A Trust-Based Personalized Differential Privacy Guarantees for Online Social Networks

Online social networks have emerged as a significant data source, but the extensive collection and utilization of personal information have given rise to profound concerns regarding privacy. From a legislative and policy perspective, and in alignment with the concept of privacy as control, users have the right to control their personal privacy information. However, users often encounter challenges in terms of understanding and effectively managing their privacy settings to align with their specific privacy requirements. To address this issue, in this paper, we incorporate the concept of trust and propose a trust-based personalized differential privacy model for online social networks, denoted as TPDP, which relies on a trusted central server to facilitate its operation. Specifically, when a user requests access to another user’s personal information, the TPDP mechanism provides a privacy response, where the privacy level is determined based on the direct and indirect trust values among users, calculated automatically by the trusted central server. Furthermore, the proposed TPDP model offers user-to-user personalized differential privacy protection from the perspectives of network structures, trust-related factors, and trust propagation patterns. Finally, we validate the model’s feasibility and assess the privacy-utility trade-off, as well as its robustness against attacks, through theoretical analysis and performance evaluation.