A Survey on Privacy in Social Networking Websites

Most Social Networking Websites facilitate users with the features like online interaction, sharing of information and developing new relationships etc. As a result, more and more data containing personal information such as name, gender, age, birthday, email address, phone number, current university/company, political views and so on are published over the Internet, which might be lead to a serious privacy leakage. Since some of these items are sensitive, access control is widely employed in order to protect the privacy of users. The current protection mechanisms, such as privacy policies and access control mechanisms fall short on protecting the privacy of the users. This paper presents a survey on different frameworks for privacy enhanced social networking websites, which technically enforces the protection of the personal information of a user, when interacting with social applications.