3LP: Three Layers of Protection for Individual Privacy in Facebook

Abstract

The possibility that an unauthorised agent is able to infer a user’s hidden information (an attribute’s value) is known as attribute inference risk. It is one of the privacy issues for Facebook users in recent times. An existing technique [1] provides privacy by suppressing users’ attribute values from their profiles. However, suppression of an attribute value sometimes is not enough to secure a user’s confidential information. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that (after taking necessary steps on attribute values) a user’s sensitive information can still be inferred through his/her friendship information. We evaluated our approach experimentally on two datasets. We propose 3LP, a new three layers protection technique, to provide privacy protection to users of on-line social networks.