Ontology Based Privacy Management for Social Software

Social software is defined as software that enables its users to interact socially on the Web through organization structures such as a social network. The use of social software spans casual friendship networks to complex process management. The number of users of social software of various sorts is huge, for example Facebook.com by itself has more than one billion users. Users of these systems typically share a vast amount of content. The content that is being shared is always targeted for some of the users of the system but not for all of them. Every user has the right to demand that her privacy is preserved by not showing the content to those individuals for whom the content was not meant for. However, everyday more and more interesting cases of privacy breaches are taking place. A privacy breach by itself is not desired but it can have further effects. For example, if a private credit card information is shared with unknown people, it can result in serious security problems. Or, an invention that needs to be secret in a company is mistakenly shared with a competitor company, the invention details may leak. For these reasons, it is extremely important to preserve users' privacy in social software. To enable this, we need intelligent software that can keep track of users' privacy requirements, check if these requirements can be met by the system, and lead the user to take appropriate action as needed. For example, the software can suggest the user not to share a certain piece of information if the social software cannot guarantee its privacy or the software can signal that an important content has been shared with undesirable individuals. Accordingly, the aim of this project is to design and develop the necessary components and techniques for an intelligent software that will manage a user's privacy on her behalf.