A Privacy Preserving Framework to Protect Sensitive Data in Online Social Networks

In this day and age, Internet has become an innate part of our existence. This virtual platform brings people together, facilitating information exchange, sharing photos, posts, etc. As interaction happens without any physical presence in the medium, trust is often compromised in all these platforms operating via the Internet. Although many of these sites provide their ingrained privacy settings, they are limited and do not cater to all users’ needs. The proposed work highlights the privacy risk associated with various personally identifiable information posted in online social networks (OSN). The work is three-facet, i.e. it first identifies the type of private information which is unwittingly revealed in social media tweets. To prevent unauthorized users from accessing private data, an anonymous mechanism is put forth that securely encodes the data. The information loss incurred due to anonymization is analyzed to check how much of privacy-utility trade-off is attained. The private data is then outsourced to a more secure server that only authorized people can access. Finally, to provide effective retrieval at the server-side, the traditional searchable encryption technique is modified, considering the typo errors observed in user searching behaviours. With all its constituents mentioned above, the purported approach aims to give more fine-grained control to the user to decide who can access their data and is the correct progression towards amputating privacy violation.