Collateral damage of Online Social Network Applications

Copyright © 2016 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved. Third party application providers in Online Social Networks can collect personal data of users through their friends without the user's awareness. In some cases, one or more application providers may own several applications and thus the same provider may collect an excessive amount of personal data, which creates a serious privacy risk. Previous research has developed methods to quantify privacy risks in Online Social Networks. However, most of the existing work does not focus on the issues of personal data disclosure via the user's friends applications and application providers. The aim of this paper is to investigate the need for solutions that can compute privacy risk related to applications and application providers. In this work we perform a legal and technical analysis of the privacy threats stemming from the collection of personal data by third parties when applications are installed by the user's friends. Particularly, we examine the case of Facebook as it is the most popular Online Social Network nowadays.

ISBN:9789897581670

Publication year:2016