TWC SBE: Small: Protecting the Online Privacy of Users of Social Networks

人们普遍认识到保护在线隐私很重要，现代社会以多种方式体现了这种担忧。初步研究表明，第三方凭借适度的爬行和计算资源，并采用简单的数据挖掘启发式方法，可以将在线服务和公开信息结合起来，创建居住在任何目标地理区域的用户的详细档案。本研究调查了可以显着改善用户隐私保护的措施，同时又不会降低他们的整体互联网体验。重点是不太值得信赖的第三方（例如数据经纪人、广告商、垃圾邮件发送者、恶意软件分发者和恋童癖者），他们可以从许多不同的在线和离线来源抓取、聚合和推断信息。这项研究有两个相互关联的研究主旨。首先，它探讨了第三方可以在多大程度上收集、汇总和统计处理来自 OSN 和其他在线和离线来源的信息以创建配置文件。这一推动力正在开发严格的统计方法和概率模型来估计潜在隐私泄露的程度。其次，本研究调查了政府可以制定的各种隐私政策以及 OSN 可以采取的各种措施，以降低隐私风险。对于有希望的政策和措施组合，本研究量化了隐私保护和可用性之间的权衡。

It is generally recognized that protecting online privacy is important, with modern society manifesting this concern in many ways. Preliminary research indicates that third parties, with modest crawling and computational resources, and employing simple data mining heuristics, can potentially combine online services and publicly available information to create detailed profiles of the users living in any targeted geographical area.This research investigates measures that can significantly improve privacy protection of users, while not degrading their overall Internet experience. The focus is on less-trustworthy third parties (e.g., data brokers, advertisers, spammers, malware distributors, and pedophiles), who can scrape, aggregate and infer information from many different online and offline sources. This research has two interrelated research thrusts. First, it explores to what extent third parties can collect, aggregate, and statistically process information from OSNs and other online and offline sources to create profiles. This thrust is developing rigorous statistical methodologies and probabilistic models for estimating the degree of potential privacy leakage. Second, this research investigates a variety of privacy policies that governments can establish, and a wide range of measures OSNs can take, to reduce the privacy risk. For promising combinations of policies and measures, this research quantifies the trade-off between privacy protection and usability.