Privacy and security in online social networks: A survey

Abstract

Online social networks (OSN) are a permanent presence in today’s personal and professional lives of a huge segment of the population, with direct consequences to offline activities. Built on a foundation of trust – users connect to other users with common interests or overlapping personal trajectories – online social networks and the associated applications extract an unprecedented volume of personal information. Unsurprisingly, serious privacy and security risks emerged, positioning themselves along two main types of attacks: attacks that exploit the implicit trust embedded in declared social relationships; and attacks that harvest user’s personal information for ill-intended use. This article provides an overview of the privacy and security issues that emerged so far in OSNs. We introduce a taxonomy of privacy and security attacks in OSNs, we overview existing solutions to mitigate those attacks, and outline challenges still to overcome.