Understanding and Controlling User Privacy
Users today are uploading large amounts of content that are personal in nature. Such sensitive pieces of content are shared with the OSN provider, third party applications, and other users of the services. This has led to serious privacy leakage issues and also increased the privacy management overhead for the user. We perform large-scale measurement studies to understand privacy risks with sharing personal content online and propose new systems to provide strong privacy guarantees.
Understanding online user privacy
Online social networks are now a popular way for users to connect, express themselves, and share content. Users in today's online social networks often post a profile, consisting of attributes like geographic location, interests, and schools attended and they post personally identifiable information in their online content. To that end our research focuses on quantitatively identify what type of information leak in the online social network through their posted content and profile.
http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/privacy_leakage.html
Today millions of users share billions of content in online platforms. Intuitively these users should ideally manage the privacy of each of these content. Further they should change the privacy of the content temporally to keep up with the changes of their lives. We investigate what overhead does this complex process of privacy management incurs on normal users today and how we can help them
http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/iab_position.html
A solution towards giving users ultimate online privacy is to anonymize any content they post online. However such a proposal leads to the question that how would users leverage such a privacy preserving system. Will the users leverage the anonymity to spread malicious content like hate speech? Or will spammers be more active in the veil of anonymity. We find answers to these questions by actually collecting data from a real world anonymous social media system.
http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/privacy_anonymity.html
Controlling online user privacy
Alongwith our effort towards understanding the privacy concerns and privacy preserving behaviors of users we direct our research effort to also help users control their privacy. We come up with a new model of exposure control for arguing about privacy violations while sharing content online. We used this model for developing techniques for improving user privacy online.
http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/privacy_exposure_control.html
We note that user privacy is also compromised by components of data sharing infrastructure itself. The component could be a social network provider, third party apps that a user employ or even a cloud computing provider. We develop technologies for protecting the privacy of users from the prying eyes of these system components.
http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/privacy_infrastructural.html
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Imprint | Data Protection
