User-Friendly Privacy-Preserving Photo Sharing on Online Social Networks

A variety of online social networking (OSNs) services facilitates users to share a huge amount of their personal information such as photos. On the other hand, users may unintentionally reveal their photos to other audiences. Therefore, users of OSNs strive to protect their photos with existing privacy management mechanisms. Moreover, users need adequate feedback to understand their privacy preferences in photo sharing services. In this paper, the authors present a new visualization mechanism called Visual Privacy Management Policy (VPMP) in order to simplify the configuring privacy settings when users of OSNs share their photos with others. Also, this solution aims to address the shortcomings of privacy settings policies of photo sharing in OSNs. Furthermore, the solution employs a social graph and circles for visualizing when, where, how and with whom users will share their photos. So, this solution provides users a comprehensible and effective way to determine their privacy settings. The authors evaluate the visual privacy management policy (VPMP) for photo sharing with a user study that compared our solution with the user interface of photo-sharing on Facebook. The obtained findings provide quantitative evidence regarding the applicability of VPMP in terms of usability and privacy protection.