Modeling Role-Based Privacy in Social Networking Services

As social networking services are getting more and more common, the need for privacy enhancing options, sophisticated identity management and anonymity emerges. In this paper the authors propose using role-based privacy as a response for these needs and introduce a novel model called nexus-identity network that is capable of describing services extended with such functionality. The concerned principles of role-based privacy are conferred in the paper and criteria are presented for anonymity. Conforming to the criteria the authors suggest storing the profiles of different identities in a tree hierarchy in a user-friendly manner. The analysis of anonymity shows that the network has a structure that can be easily interpreted similarly to graphs representing connections in regular social networks. The ease of profile management and network visualization are advantages of the nexus-identity model which can make a social networking service privacy and user-friendly as well.