UPP: User Privacy Policy for Social Networking Sites

Since their introduction, SNS (Social Networking Sites) such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have attracted millions of users and have become established places for keeping contact with old acquaintances and meeting new ones. Nonetheless, due to lack of user awareness and proper privacy protection tools, huge quantities of user data, including personal information, pictures and videos are quickly falling into the hands of authorities, strangers, recruiters and even the public at large. By using SNSs and accepting their privacy policy, users have volunteered to relinquish their ownership on their own data, which explains why the proposed privacy solutions based on current SNSs cannot solve all user privacy issues. As such, we start by setting the foundations for privacy and introduce a privacy framework for SNSs. Then, based on this framework, we present a user privacy policy (UPP) which provides users with an easy and flexible way to specify and communicate their privacy concerns to other users, third parties and to the SNS provider.