PRIVACY AND ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK

Abstract

The popularization of Information and Communication Technologies allowed new forms of interaction, including Online Social Network (OSN) services. These services could share personal data with third-party organizations through Application Programming Interfaces (API), making it a complex task to observe the data flow. This research proposes a model to identify levels and elements available in the flow of personal data via API between organizations holding OSN services and external agents. It converged the recurrent mechanisms into providing data sets from the OSN services to external agents from a systematized reading of the technical documentation to establish a database model to fetch unitedly the possibility of storing information about the levels in which API provided personal data to external agents, applying the Entity-Relationship Model. Subsequently, it presents a Data Mart as a proof of concept for the proposed database model, intending to compare the ways of accessing the personal data attributes stored and, following, shared by the OSN services to external agents. It showed that the model could clarify the elements inherent in the data flow, allowing a more structured analysis, including the possibility of monitoring changes in the API by organizations over time.