Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks (The facebook case)

Online social networks are reflection human interactions. User share their profile, communicate via messaging and share contents using these online social networks. There are millions of profile available online which contain information about user, their preferences, and their interaction. It posses security threats if it is used by an adversaries. In this paper the authors tried to detect those pattern of information about OSN users and discussed possible threats about their privacy. They have used facebook as a usecase and specifically focus on information from CMU campus. experiments, identification

Information revelation:
Facebook provides default privacy control interface where user could limit his/her personal details from disclosures. However user could control the granular details to establish different degrees of trust and intimacy with others. Some details of revelation of user information are given bellow:
1) Profile search-ability: Strangely enough, a small fraction (1.2%) of user uses privacy setting.
2) Profile visibility: restricting profile access or view to other - only 0.06% of CMU user restricted their profiles to CMU users.
3)Facebook data access: personal facial image and name (first name and last name) are available on facebook to all facebook users which could be used to make dossier about users. Political, sexual preferences, and user credential are available to large fraction of users which could enable some of them to gain control a user profile.
Privacy implications:
The rationale behind large number of user data and sparingly used of privacy preference is that users are unconcerned about their personal privacy. A possible consequence could be high risk to a user or/and his/her associates. These risks are:
1) Stalking:
* user residences and credentials are available online to majority of facebook users. A fraction of facebook user could access those information to actual person and his/her whereabouts. A major profile with AIM and twitter like services (which leads to cyber-stalking) that buddies are added without acknowledgement from them.
* Re-indentification
* Demographic re-identification
* Face re-identification
* Social security numbers and identity theft
* first four digits of SSN + birthday helps in locating the identifying the place where SSN was made.
* Building di