Assisted Social Identity Management

The rise of the social web shifts personal identity management to the online world. As a result, personal information is persistently available to all of a user’s contacts without distinguishing between different contexts such as Work and Leisure. Personal information being available to audiences outside the intended context violates contextual integrity and poses a threat to users’ privacy. We argue that a formal description and a conceptualization of the problem scope is required to systematically address current challenges of personal identity management in online social settings. Based thereupon, we propose assisted social identity management to support the user in finding segregated audiences among his contacts as a first step to advance from the current situation and sketch further improvements. We evaluate our approach using real-world data, demonstrating the feasibility of our proposal.