Enforcing Access Control in Social Network Sites

Confidentiality and data handling are important issues for social network users. Ideally, access control enforcement should not depend on the social networking provider but should be under the control of the user. In this paper, we propose a practical, SNS platform-independent solution, for social network users to control their data. We develop concepts that are general enough to describe access control restrictions for different SNS platforms. Our architecture uses encryption to enforce access control for users’ private information based on their privacy preferences. We have implemented our model as a Firefox extension.