مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد حفظ حریم خصوصی برای شبکه های اجتماعی آنلاین – الزویر ۲۰۱۸

Popular Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, are logically centralized services, that are owned and managed by single business entities. It is no secret to any one that their business, although presented as a free-service provision model, is fueled by targeted and retargeted marketing [2]. These are two marketing strategies that stand on data collection and on learning as much as possible about potential customers, their tastes, their habits, their spending patterns, or even their feelings and states of mind. Based on such information, potential customers can be smartly targeted, or retargeted by presenting the right product to the right person at ideally the right time, making advertisement more profitable. Most of these popular OSN companies count over hundreds of millions of registered users that enjoy their services, and occupy considerable portions of their computing and storage resources without direct subscriptions or monetary service fees. Therefore, they have a vital interest in collecting as much data as possible about their “free” subscribers, and in learning all what could possibly be extracted from this collected data. This collected data does not only cover the information that OSN users willingly upload and share with their contacts, but encompasses it to implicitly disclosed information, such as the times when users are online, the locations from where they connect, the type of activities they perform based on different locations and times, etc. This unprecedented massive and uncontrolled collection and aggregation of different types of data about millions of individuals, from across all areas of the globe, in the hands of a few centralized entities is considered as one of the most serious and fundamental threats to users right to-be-left-alone; that is to their right to privacy.1 This has been even more accentuated with the detected incidents of data leakage, either accidentally, due to attacks exploiting security breaches in those systems,2 or intentionally to interested third parties such as secret services, or other interested companies. This makes some advocates spell out the fact that OSN users are not customers but rather the primary commercialized product under the business model of current centralized OSN providers.3 One of the most systematic and straightforward responses to mitigate this privacy dilemma of logically centralized services is to move to decentralized architectures. This idea has given birth to research under the area of what has been known as Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs), where the fundamental motivation is to mitigate privacy issues that are inherrent to the centralized model by desiging solutions that can provide similar online socializing functionality without the need of any one single central trusted entity [3]. Achieving this has been considered under two main conceptions. The first one consists at an architecture of multiple independent federated servers that provide the same OSN functionality, from which users can freely choose which to join and whom to trust, and between which users can freely and seamlessly switch without losing any of their advantages or functionality (e.g., [5–۷]). The second conception takes decentralization to its extremes and consists at building peer-to-peer (P2P) networks of end users devices, with direct one-to-one interactions between them (e.g., [8–۱۰]).