PROTOSS: A Run Time Tool for Detecting Privacy Violations in Online Social Networks

As online social networks are becoming part of both social and work life, preserving privacy of their users is becoming tremendously difficult. While these social networks are promising privacy through privacy agreements, everyday new privacy leakages are emerging. Ideally, online social networks should be able to manage and maintain their agreements through well-founded methods. However, the dynamic nature of the online social networks is making it difficult to keep private information contained. We have developed PROTOSS, a run time tool for detecting privacy leakages in online social networks. PROTOSS captures relations among users, their privacy agreements with an online social network operator, and domain-based inference rules. It then uses model checking to detect if an online social network will leak private information.