Protecting privacy of children in social networking sites with rule-based privacy tool

With the growing use of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, privacy issues have become a major concern especially for children nowadays. There is no doubt that this new form of communication is gaining popularity nowadays. SNS offer many benefits such as reconnecting long lost friends and communicating with each other by just sitting in front of the screen. However, it raises many ethical and social issues and privacy is one of them. Users are often exposed to various threats and violations because they do not know how to protect their personal information from being revealed to strangers. Hence, a system is needed to assist children in managing and controlling their privacy settings. The privacy management system proposed in this study is based on a rule-based expert system which is used to emulate human intelligence by using rules and conditions. The rules, which are the main component in a rule-based system, are used to determine the suitable privacy settings for children. The privacy settings are based on the recommendation obtained from a questionnaire given to the parents who have a Facebook account and are aware of how to manage and protect their privacy.