Using Social Semantic Web Data for Privacy Policies

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,7, University of Hannover (Knowledge Based Systems Institute), language: English, abstract: Social Web applications are steadily gaining popularity. At the same time, the open nature of such services leads to the exposure of an immense amount of personal data.Due to insucient access control on nowadays Social Web applications problems in terms of privacy arise. This thesis focuses on the need for more exible and negrained privacy restrictions. It analyses privacy problems of current Social Web applications and compares the privacy preferences such applications over. Based on this analysis, this thesis extends the well-known principle of policy-based accesscontrol, which is a exible and dynamic way to dene who can get access to what content based on user preferences. The presented extension accommodates policies to the requirements of the Social Web. In particular, it describes how to exploit Social Semantic Web data for privacy reasoning. This includes the retrieval of Socialand Semantic Web data from various information sources on the Web. It further includes its usage for the denition of privacy policies and its consideration during the policy evaluation. Consequently, using Social Semantic Web data for policy reasoning allows users to exactly dene which social relationships and properties a requester has to have in order to access a particular resource. These conditions can cross the boundaries of a single Social Web application. Hence, a user can for example state that a friend on one application can access pictures stored on another application; thus bridging the walled garden of nowadays Social Web applications.