Affiliations: Concordia Institute for Information Systems
Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada | Electrical Engineering Department, University of
São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Abstract: Social media has become a popular means of communication thanks to
the advancement of computer network and web technology. Social networking
service (SNS) provides a virtual platform for users to realize their
personal/professional purposes. Users have a great motivation to share their
personal updates in social media in order to maintain their contacts. In the
meantime, users have a strong need to protect their privacy in order to prevent
all kinds of frauds from attackers. In the existing literature, many research
efforts address privacy protection issues by employing computer security
technology. To our best knowledge, it is the lack of a framework to propose a
holistic framework of privacy protection encompassing other factors, such as
user's behaviour, SNS provider's security policy, and information management
strategy. In this background, this paper aims to derive a reference model for
privacy protection in social networking service by using Environment-Based
Design (EBD) methodology. A systematic SNS environment analysis is conducted to
identify the major challenges and to organize coherent solutions.
Keywords: Privacy protection, social networking service, environment-based design (EBD) methodology, recursive object model (ROM)
