Privacy for Social Networks

Overview

Topic status: We're looking for students to study this topic.

Social Networks have transformed the web into a new medium for social communities to share personal data and online activities. This project will look at the privacy impact of such large-scale sharing and develop a model, expression language, and demonstrator for a general access-control mechanism that can support social network privacy requirements.

This aim of this project is to define a general user-centric mechanism to support privacy on social networks. Privacy can be seen as a subset of access-control, and along with permission and obligation management, are fundamental social norms that are lacking comprehensive support across social networks. Traditional concepts, like personal data retention periods, and new concepts, like 'friends of friends', will need to be harmonised and incorporated into existing systems and languages.

The end result will be an interoperable specification of a privacy-enhanced access control language and a demonstrable prototype that exhibits the privacy behaviour expected from typical social network interactions. The proposed new privacy language will also be submitted to international standards groups for global adoption.

Project Approach

  • Collate and review a set of common vocabulary semantics for privacy and access control on popular social networks, including PrimeLife's privacy requirements. Outcome: General Semantic Model for Privacy-Enhanced Access Control.
  • Review and analyse the open protocol approach and design architecture for OneSocialWeb. Outcome: Technical Architecture for Privacy across Social Networks.
  • Develop extensions to the existing ODRL policy language to support new privacy requirements. Outcome: Proposal for a Access Control XMPP Extension Protocol.
  • Develop a prototype system. Outcome: Demonstrator based on the OneSocialWeb Reference Implementation.

References

  1. ODRL Initiative http://odrl.net/
  2. XMPP Standards http://xmpp.org/
  3. OneSocialWeb http://onesocialweb.org/
  4. PrimeLife Privacy Project http://www.primelife.eu
Study level
Honours
Supervisors
QUT
Organisational unit

Science and Engineering Faculty

Research area

Computer Science

Contact
Please contact the supervisor.