Trust Evaluation in Social Networking: A Review

Social networking has become very popular in recent years by serving as a medium for disseminating information and connecting like-minded people. It influences today’s social culture and changes the way of modern life. The success of social networking relies on the level of trust that social group members have with each other as well as with social networking service providers. Therefore, trust evaluation in the social networking becomes an important topic that has attracted special concerns. Many trust models or schemes have been proposed to improve the security or performance in social networking. However, existing work mostly only focused on certain aspects. There still lacks a comprehensive study on trust evaluation and management in social networking. In this paper, we propose comprehensive criteria with nine aspects for trust evaluation. Related work in this area published in recent five years have been seriously surveyed and evaluated based on the criteria. We compare existing work and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the current methods in order to figure out open research issues and motivate future research efforts.