Arastoo Bozorgi
Ph.D. Oral Comprehensive
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Saeed Samet, Dr. Antonina Kolokolova, Dr. Lourdes Pena-Castillo and Dr. Adrian Fiech

Privacy-preserving Online Social Networks

Department of Computer Science
Monday, December 4, 2017, 3:00p.m., Room EN 2022

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Abstract

The popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) among Internet users is undeniable and increasing over time, causing the providers of such platforms to become the owners of huge data repositories consisting of people’s information all around the world. The heavy responsibility of keeping user data private is on providers shoulders, but on the other hand, the administration cost of such free-available platforms force the data owners to use the stored data for other purposes such as advertisement which costs the users’ privacy.

The huge amount of effort which have been devoted to solve the privacy concerns over OSNs clearly shows the impact of this problem from the researchers point of view. To contribute to this research, we investigate the existing solutions to preserve user privacy and discuss the applicability of each approach on OSNs in various applications including healthcare. We will introduce a privacy-enabled Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture which can be applied to OSNs and will propose practical approaches to guarantee data availability in such platforms. Enabling users to search in a distributed environment by implementing distributed tagging and applying the proposed architecture to healthcare online Social Networks (HSNs), which have different privacy requirements, are the other achievements of this research.