A Study of Online Social Network Privacy Via the TAPE Framework

While personal information privacy is threatened by online social networks, researchers are seeking for privacy protection tools and methods to assist online social network users. In this paper, we propose a Trust-Aware Privacy Evaluation framework, called TAPE, aiming to address this problem. Under the TAPE framework we investigate how to quantitatively evaluate the privacy risk, as a function of people's awarenesses of privacy risks as well as whether people can be trusted by their friends to protect others' personal information. Simulations are performed to illustrate the key concepts and calculations, as well as the advantages of TAPE. Based on the TAPE framework, we also propose an unfriending strategy in terms of privacy protection, which outperforms other existing unfriending strategies.