Privacy in Online Social Networks: An Ontological Model for Self-Presentation

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an important part of daily digital interactions for more than half billion users around the world. Unconstrained by physical spaces, the OSNs offer to web users new interesting means to communicate, interact, and socialize. The OSNs exhibit many of the characteristics of human societies in terms of forming relationships and how those relationships are used for personal information disclosure. However, current OSNs lack an effective mechanism to represent social relationships of the users that leads to undesirable consequences of leakage of users’ personal information to unintended audiences. We propose an ontological model to represent diverse social relationships and manage self-presentation of social web users. This model is inspired from most influential social theories about self-presentation and tie strength. This model regulates personal information disclosure on the basis of social role and relationship quality between the users. We also present results of our user study, which demonstrates that relationship quality plays vital role to control personal information disclosure in social web, and quality of relationship between users can be easily inferred from user interaction patterns in online social networks.