Privacy-aware friend finding in social network based on thumbs-up data

Abstract

Social network has provided a promising way for massive users to share their ideas and communicate with each other. A key issue in social network is to find out the prospective friends of users so as to extend the users’ social cycles. Fortunately, users’ thumbs-up data on web news or blogs have become an important evaluation basis in friend finding. Typically, through analyzing the thumbs-up data from different users, we can find out the friends or neighbors of a user. However, the thumbs-up data are often sensitive to users as they can disclose the private information of users, which violate the civil privacy-protection laws enacted by governments. In view of this challenge, we introduce the Simhash technique in information retrieval domain into social network and further bring forth a privacy-aware prospective friend-finding solution in social network based on the sensitive thumbs-up data. At last, we conduct a range of experiments based on well-known Movielens dataset. Experimental data demonstrate the advantages of our solution.