Vulnerable friend identification: Who should you beware of most in online social networks?

Abstract

© 2015 IEEE. Web users are immersed in their roles as information producers and propagation pushers. They are unaware of being potential threats to privacy-protection towards themselves and their friends. It is necessary to know who they should beware of most in their friend-networks once their privacy information is divulged inadvertently. In this paper, we aim to identify the vulnerable friend who maximizes the dissemination of privacy information. First we develop a Privacy Receiving-Disseminating (PRD) model to simulate the iterative course of privacy information dissemination within social graph. The subgraph constituted of those users who are involved in the dissemination, called Ultimate Circle of Disseminating (UCD), is then detected by an iterative algorithm. The contribution of each direct friend could be evaluated by comparing the disseminating intensities of detected UCDs before and after unfriending himself. The performance of our work has been validated empirically with the comparison of different unfriending strategies.