Privacy-driven Access Control in Social Networks by Means of Automatic Semantic Annotation


Abstract in English

In online social networks (OSN), users quite usually disclose sensitive information about themselves by publishing messages. At the same time, they are (in many cases) unable to properly manage the access to this sensitive information due to the following issues: i) the rigidness of the access control mechanism implemented by the OSN, and ii) many users lack of technical knowledge about data privacy and access control. To tackle these limitations, in this paper, we propose a dynamic, transparent and privacy-driven access control mechanism for textual messages published in OSNs. The notion of privacy-driven is achieved by analyzing the semantics of the messages to be published and, according to that, assessing the degree of sensitiveness of their contents. For this purpose, the proposed system relies on an automatic semantic annotation mechanism that, by using knowledge bases and linguistic tools, is able to associate a meaning to the information to be published. By means of this annotation, our mechanism automatically detects the information that is sensitive according to the privacy requirements of the publisher of data, with regard to the type of reader that may access such data. Finally, our access control mechanism automatically creates sanitiz

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