Online social networks greatly expand the scale of people's social connections, and have the potential to become an open computing platform, where new services can be quickly offered and propagated. Mechanisms for trust management and privacy protection are integral to the future success of online social networks. A trustworthy social network should allow users to flexibly control who can access their social information and to what extend. Online social networks also broaden the scope and scale of social science. Privacy issues arise naturally when the data of online social networks are shared for research and other purposes. This project develops theoretical and practical techniques for the management of trust and privacy for online social networks. One central goal is to look into the future of online social networks and develop techniques that are not only suitable for today?s social networks but for the future open computing platform built on top of them. In particular, this project focuses on flexible trust models for social networks, privacy preserving feedback issuing and management, and graph anonymization for the sharing of social network data. The developed techniques directly help the secure development and deployment of a wide range of new types of services that are well beyond the realm of traditional online services. This project also develops educational materials to improve undergraduate students? understanding and interests in computer science and attract more students to enroll in computer science degrees.
CAREER: Trust and Privacy Management for Online Social Networks