Privacy in social networks: Existing challenges and proposals for solution

Social Networks play an increasingly important role for social interaction, allowing their users to bridge spatial and temporal communication boundaries. However, through their rising pervasiveness and the use of sensitive data such as geospatial information, the rise of social networks has also prompted privacy concerns. On the one hand, in the current oligopolistic landscape of social networks, few service providers gather large amounts of personal data that can be used for profiling and targeted advertising. On the other hand, the users´ contacts threaten privacy. Users are unaware of which contacts have access to items they shared on their profile and lack suitable tools to control the visibility of these items. This talk presents existing challenges in the field of social network privacy and discusses new solutions such as serious games and visualizations to address these issues.