Privacy through web-traveler policies in social network environments

Social networking sites are ingrained in the fabric of our day-to-day lives, with these sites being widely used to exchange personal information and content. Some forms of access control are provided by the sites themselves to protect the user-uploaded content. However, these types of control are limited in that they require the user´s input for the effective protection, otherwise a default policy which provides minimal protection is often applied. Towards providing extended content protection, in this paper we propose an approach for automated user-uploaded content control. Automatic enforcement allows us to extend the protection of content for unprotected files, preventing underage viewers from accessing adult content, tracking stolen or misused copyright-free images. This work builds upon the notion of `Web-Traveler policies´, previously introduced as a new class of content control policies. In the paper, we also provide a proof of concept implementation of our algorithms for automatic propagation for images in order to prove the applicability and strength of our approach.