Exploiting Vulnerability to Secure User Privacy on Social Networking Site

Social media gives users an efficient way to communicate and network with each other on an unprecedented scale and at rates unseen in traditional media. As his social network expands, a user’s privacy protection goes beyond his privacy setting and becomes a social networking problem. In this research, we aim to address some critical issues related to privacy protection: Would the highest privacy setting guarantee a secure protection? Given the open nature of a social networking site, is it possible to manage one’s privacy protection? With the diversity of one’s social media friends, how can one figure out an effective approach to balance between vulnerability and privacy? We present a novel way to define a vulnerable friend from an individual user’s perspective as dependent on whether or not the user’s friends’ security and privacy settings protect the friend and the individual’s network of friends (which includes the user). A single vulnerable friend in a user’s social network can place all friends at risk. Using experiments, we demonstrate how much security an individual user can improve by unfriending a vulnerable friend. We also show how security and privacy weakens if newly accepted friends are unguarded or unprotected. This work provides a large-scale evaluation of new security and privacy indexes using a Facebook dataset. A new perspective for reasoning about social networking security is presented and discussed. When a user accepts a new friend, the user should ensure the new friend is not an increased security risk with the potential of negatively impacting the entire friend network. Additionally, by leveraging the indexes proposed and employing new strategies for unfriending vulnerable friends, it is possible to further improve security and privacy without changing the social networking site’s existing architecture.