Privacy-preserving information sharing and management schema for collaborative social networks

Social network is a cyber nation. The knowledge and information exchanged between different social networks are important in enhancing user experience. However, sharing information should not be completely barrier free as weak polices and uncontrolled sharing could lead to numerous security risks. Thus, we propose a method to effectively share information in a secure and efficient manner by establishing collaboration between social networks. The proposed method implements sharing components without changing the original data and system structure. Various social networks can be connected to each other; this connection can be referred to as a united social network (USN). Within a USN, each member social network has its own sharing policy and controls its shared information. Any two social networks can initialize communication and mutually determine sharing policies. Then, information can be shared between networks using the proposed schema. A social network user´s decisions are involved in each sharing decision. This determines access parameters. Privacy can be systematically preserved by defining subject (requester) attributes, environment attributes, and resource attributes while information is shared among different collaborative social networks.