Online social networks: Enhancing user trust through effective controls and identity management

Online social networking is one of the largest Internet activities, with almost one third of all daily Internet users visiting these websites. Characteristics of this environment are issues relating to trust, user privacy and anonymity. Service providers are focused primarily on acquiring users and little attention is given to the effective management of these users within the social networking environment. In order to examine this problem, user trust and its enhancement is discussed. An evaluation of current identity management processes and effective controls is undertaken, in order to understand the current environment. Lastly, by means of a detailed experiment focusing on the two main online social networking providers, Facebook and MySpace, controls and identity management processes were assessed for vulnerabilities. The findings of this experiment, together with the current environment of controls and identity management practices, form the proposed set of controls. These controls are aimed at increasing trust and privacy through the effective implementation of these controls and identity management processes.