Abstract
Online social networks (OSNs) have become an integral part of social interaction and communication between people. Reasons include the ubiquity of OSNs that is offered through mobile devices and the possibility to bridge spatial and temporal communication boundaries. However, several researchers have raised privacy concerns due to the large amount of user data shared on OSNs. Yet, despite the large body of research addressing OSN privacy issues, little differentiation of data types on social network sites is made and a generally accepted classification and terminology for such data is missing. The lack of a terminology impedes comparability of related work and discussions among researchers, especially in the case of privacy implications of different data types. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper develops a well-founded terminology based on a thorough literature analysis and a conceptualization of typical OSN user activities. The terminology is organized hierarchically resulting in a taxonomy of data types. The paper furthermore discusses and develops a metric to assess the privacy relevance of different data types. Finally, the taxonomy is applied to the five major OSNs to evaluate its generalizability.
Highlights
Online social networks (OSNs) have reached major importance due to their increased usage and ubiquity, rising membership, and presence in the media
This paper aims at tackling the lack of a generally accepted terminology for describing and differentiating data types on OSNs by developing and proposing a detailed taxonomy.a It is intended to benefit discussions among researchers, alleviate difficulties when comparing data elements within and across OSNs, and provide guidance for end users when assessing the privacy implications in dealing with particular OSN data types
6.3 Evaluation of the privacy relevance metric As pointed out, privacy relevance depends on multiple factors and varies for different OSNs and user profiles
Summary
Online social networks (OSNs) have reached major importance due to their increased usage and ubiquity, rising membership, and presence in the media Allowing their users to create custom profile sites, express relationships with other users, and explore the resulting social graph [1], they combine previously available communication and self-representation functions, such as personal blogs, forums, and instant messaging with novel social functions. 1.1 Privacy threats and the need for different data types With the increased usage frequency and ubiquitous usage of OSNs, the quantity and sensitivity of user data that is stored on OSNs has grown tremendously as well This is fostered by the availability of social networking services on mobile devices that provide location-based features and camera functions, for instance, allowing users to publish. This understanding of privacy as respecting social norms of intended contexts is referred to as contextual integrity [8]
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