Today we have organizational and software procedures that facilitate the exchange of interpersonal information in social networking sites, instant messaging, bulletin boards, online role?playing games, computer?supported collaborative work, and online education. All of these applications fit into the larger category of social media that support virtual communities. As we increasingly rely on this cyberspace, the issue of privacy protection in social media is critically important. The objective of this project is to develop an advanced framework called U-Control for Digital Persona and Privacy Management to manage and release personal information considering a notion of digital persona based user privacy preferences and associated risks in disclosing such private information over virtual communities.
Successful completion of this project will result in the development of a protection framework and architecture to address the privacy challenges in social media-based virtual communities. This research effort is also expected to set an important direction to the future research in the area of virtual communities and online privacy solutions. This research has the potential for broad societal impact by providing user-controlled sharing of personal attributes and the efficiency of existing business models and operations of such.
Since a broad range of privacy information of different sensitiveness can be exchanged in social networks, it is necessary to assist users by presenting potential risk on financial and personality damage, before releasing privacy attributes. The objective of this project is to develop an advanced framework called U-Control for Digital Persona and Privacy Management to manage and release personal information considering a notion of digital persona based user privacy preferences and associated risks in disclosing such private information over virtual communities. In this project, we developed a formal model to accommodate various sharing and privacy preferences of social network users. Also, policy management in terms of conflict detection and resolution has been studied. We also developed usability test modules based on our proof-of-concept prototype on Facebook and Google+. Our research results were published at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and our work was also highlighted as a featured article by IEEE the Special Technical Community on Social Networks. Through this project, we supported five graduate students including one PhD graduate who is currently a tenure-track assistant professor at Delaware State University. Also, this project supported 4 Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) participants. Through this research, our students at ASU could study more practical problems in computerized information systems such as social networks and cloud computing. In addition, our research environment helped our students learn research trends and outcomes in ensuring security and privacy requirements for virtual communities. One of students includes recipients of DoD information assurance scholarship who would eventually contribute to national security in the near future.
