Secure Collaborative Social Networks

A social network is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between individuals, groups, organizations, computers, websites, and other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups, while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. Social networks provide both a visual and a mathematical analysis of relationships. Social network has been researched for a while. However, to our best knowledge, privacy-preserving social networks have not been well explored. In this paper, we would like to address how to build up a social network involving multiple parties. Data collection is a necessary step in the social-network-construction process. Due to privacy reasons, collecting data from different parties becomes difficult and these concerns may prevent the parties from directly sharing the data. How multiple parties collaboratively construct a social network without breaching data privacy presents a challenge. The objective of this paper is to provide a solution for privacy-preserving collaborative social-network problem.