A visualization tool for evaluating access control policies in facebook-style social network systems

  • Authors:
  • Mohd Anwar;Philip W. L. Fong

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Understanding the privacy implication of adopting a certain privacy setting is a complex task for the users of social network systems. Users need tool support to articulate potential access scenarios and perform policy analysis. Such a need is particularly acute for Facebook-style Social Network Systems (FSNSs), in which semantically rich topology-based policies are used for access control. In this work, we develop a prototypical tool for Reflective Policy Assessment (RPA) --- a process in which a user examines her profile from the viewpoint of another user in her extended neighbourhood in the social graph. We verify the utility and usability of our tool in a within-subject user study.