Discovering trust patterns in ego networks

Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Elena Ferrari

Abstract: In the past decade, online social networks have provided invaluable data in understanding how social networks change in time while attracting new users and fostering relationships among members. The concept of social trust was developed to explain why and how much users trust each other to become friends or expose their personal data. Existing work on social trust analyze behavioral features and profile attributes to find trust between pairs of users. Although useful, these works suffer from the problem of incomplete, inaccurate and inconsistent social network data. We approach the problem of analyzing trust from an ego network perspective. We observe new friendships, group formations and structural roles of users in ego networks to outline three trust questions. Answers to these questions provide insights into how social trust can be measured from user connections.