A content privacy-preserving protocol for energy-efficient access to commercial online social networks

The privacy issue of online social networks (OSNs) has been getting attention from the public, especially when data privacy has caused the disagreement between users and OSN providers. While the providers utilize users´ data as a commercial usage to make profit; on the other hand, users feel their privacy has been violated by such behavior. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving protocol for users´ data sharing in OSNs, where the OSN provider cannot retrieve the users´ social content while the users can efficiently add or remove a social contact and flexibly perform the data access control. Moreover, we prove that the users would allow the OSN provider to perform keyword search over the encrypted content for advertising profit, so that the OSN provider can commercialize its products without the knowledge of content.