Peer-Aware Collaborative Access Control in Social Networks

Todays online social networks (OSNs) allow a user to share his photos with others and tag the co-owners, i.e., friends who also appear in the co-owned photos. However, it is not uncommon that conflicts may arise among the co-owners because of their different privacy concerns. OSNs, unfortunately, offer only limited access control support where the publisher of the shared content is the sole decision maker to restrict access. There is thus an urgent need to develop mechanisms for multiple owners of the shared content to collaboratively determine the access rights of other users, as well as to resolve the conflicts among coowners with different requirements. Rather than competing with each other and just wanting ones own decision to be executed, OSN users may be affected their peers concerns and adjust their decisions accordingly. To incorporate such peer effects in the strategy, we formulate a model to simulate an emotional mediation among multiple co-owners. Our mechanism, called CAPE, considers the intensity with which the co-owners are willing to pick up a choice (e.g. to release a photo to the public) and the extent to which they want their decisions to be affected by their peers actions. Moreover, CAPE automatically yields the final actions for the co-owners as the mediation reaches equilibrium. It frees the co-owners from the mediation process after the initial setting, and meanwhile, offers a way to achieve more agreements among themselves.