Ontology-based Privacy Setting Transfer Scheme on Social Networking Systems

In this age of eternal connectedness, using various social networks, privacy is an important problem that needs to be transparent. Even though social networks provide a user the ability to control their privacy settings, it is often difficult to get similar privacy settings across different social network systems. This is because: (a) privacy settings rely on complicated privacy rules which define the access control to different elements by different groups; (b) the terminology used varies in different social networking systems; (c) for a typical user, it is hard to set all the privacy settings as desired due to the complicated navigation through the social networking sites. Our goal is to design a framework that enables the transfer of privacy settings among social networking systems. We collect a user’s privacy settings for many social services and store them in an ontology database. When a user registers on a new social network, our system provides recommendations of settings for it based on the user preferences as indicated by the settings in other services. Our framework covers personal privacy settings and the settings of the relationships of groups/tags and other