A user action based approach to determine trustworthiness among users in social network

Social network has become a popular platform on which a user shares different types of information with other users. This may contain also include some personal or other sensitive information which the user may not want to share with all the other users but may want to share it with other trusted users. Security is backbone of social network. For Sharing and exchanging of information between the trusted users only trustworthiness of the users needs to be determined. In this paper an approach has been proposed to determine trustworthiness among the users. Some social network attributes pertaining to actions of a user on the network have been considered that a user may perform very frequently such as tagging, comments and likes. Mutual friends between the users have also been considered since they indicate common friends among the users. Trustworthiness has been calculated by giving appropriate weightage to these attributes. Two methods have been devised for finding suitable weightage to be given to these attributes in trust calculation. The proposed method has been found to be very useful for users of a social network as it allows information sharing between the trusted users only. For experimentation, data from Facebook social network has been used.