Security and Privacy in Social Networks

Over the past several years, social networking sites have arisen to facilitate social interactions on the Internet while revolutionizing how online users interact with others. Most social networking sites offer the basic features of online interaction, communication, and interest sharing, letting individuals create online profiles that other users can view. Unfortunately, current trends in social networks indirectly require users to become system and policy administrators to protect their online contents. Social networks' security and privacy requirements still aren't well understood or fully defined. Nevertheless, it's clear that they'll be quite different from classic security and privacy requirements because social networks involve user-centric concerns and allow multiple users to specify security policies on shared data. So, we must bring a depth of security experience from multiple security domains and technologies to this field, as well as a breadth of knowledge about social networks. © 2011 IEEE.