Partial social network disclosure and crawlers

Abstract

The popularity and size of online social networks means the social graph contains valuable data about relationships. Such graph data may be sensitive. Thus, there is a need to protect the data from privacy leaks. On the other hand, public information and crawl ability are needed to support the basic utility and services on top of the social network. We propose policies where the owner of the social network can tradeoff between these two conflicting goals. We experiment with real world social network graphs and show that the owner of the graph can employ policies which can meet particular tradeoffs under different crawlers. Furthermore, the policies are efficient and scalable for the owner of the social network. © 2011 IEEE.