Privacy landscape in online social networks

Abstract

These days a large number of people are actively using online social networks (OSNs). OSN users can freely interact with their digital friends and build and maintain their online as well as their offline relationships. Intentionally or unintentionally users share a lot of their personal information on these networks which results in privacy threats and unwanted privacy breaches. One of the major reasons for this is the lack of privacy awareness among users and their inability to effectively make correct use of privacy settings. Privacy in an OSN can be viewed from different perspectives but we mainly focus on user privacy. We present an elaborative privacy landscape where we compare and contrast previous literature, review existing definitions covering taxonomy and privacy concerns in OSNs, discuss different perceptions of privacy amongst users and some privacy preserving approaches to guarantee maximum privacy.