Preserving user privacy from third-party applications in online social networks

Yuan Cheng, Jaehong Park, Ravi S. Sandhu

Abstract: Online social networks (OSNs) facilitate many third-party applications (TPAs) that offer users additional functionality and services. However, they also pose serious user privacy risk as current OSNs provide little control over disclosure of user data to TPAs. Addressing the privacy and security issues related to TPAs (and the underlying social networking platforms) requires solutions beyond a simple all-or-nothing strategy. In this paper, we outline an access control framework that provides users flexible controls over how TPAs can access user data and activities in OSNs while still retaining the functionality of TPAs. The proposed framework specifically allows TPAs to utilize some private data without actually transmitting this data to TPAs. Our approach determines access from TPAs based on user-specified policies in terms of relationships between the user and the application.