Privacy Concerns in Online Social Networks: A Users’ Perspective

Abstract

Social networking has elevated the human life to the heights of interaction, response and content sharing. It has been offering state of the art facilities to its users for a long time. Though, over the period of time, the systems have become quite matured yet alongside the benefits, multiple concerns of the user with regard to the privacy and information security also exist. Multidimensional threat spectrum to the Internet has also been posed to social networking tools. A lot of work is being done to un-derstand privacy concerns in social networks. In this scenario, a survey of privacy concerns in online social networks is conducted. Risks, privacy issues, and threats have been highlighted that occurred in recent years, analyzing the targets of attackers, their methods of attack and measures taken to counter/manage these threats are the focus. A social network depends on the user, social network site/application and communication medium provider i.e. the Internet facility. Existing research contains domain specific re-search work regarding privacy issues in social networks; however, a comprehensive research work related to overall infrastructure of online social networks is missing. Development of a taxonomy of threats and categorization of frauds relevant to social networks is an important contribution of this survey. After completing a comprehensive research survey on privacy concerns in online social networks, a set of privacy guidelines is provided and open research challenges are highlighted.