PrivacyJudge: Effective Privacy Controls for Online Published Information

With the rise of online social networks, sharing of personal information online has become the rule for many people rather than the exception. However, users have only limited abilities to effectively control privacy of their posted information. Even gaining an overview of posted information is already a difficult task. We propose a privacy control system for personal information online. Privacy Judge allows fine-grained access control to posted information and provides a comprehensive overview of previously posted data. Thereby, Privacy Judge does not require cooperation of service providers, instead operation remains transparent to them. Thus effectively providing privacy protection against other users and service providers alike. Privacy Judge follows a hybrid approach combining cryptographic enforcement with social signaling to achieve privacy protection beyond technical enforcement boundaries by leveraging system trust as well as social trust mechanisms.