A Survey on Privacy in Social Media: Identification, Mitigation, and Applications

The increasing popularity of social media has attracted a huge number of people to participate in numerous activities on a daily basis. This results in tremendous amounts of rich user-generated data. These data provide opportunities for researchers and service providers to study and better understand users’ behaviors and further improve the quality of the personalized services. Publishing user-generated data risks exposing individuals’ privacy. Users privacy in social media is an emerging research area and has attracted increasing attention recently. These works study privacy issues in social media from the two different points of views: identification of vulnerabilities and mitigation of privacy risks. Recent research has shown the vulnerability of user-generated data against the two general types of attacks, identity disclosure and attribute disclosure. These privacy issues mandate social media data publishers to protect users’ privacy by sanitizing user-generated data before publishing it. Consequently, various protection techniques have been proposed to anonymize user-generated social media data. There is vast literature on privacy of users in social media from many perspectives. In this survey, we review the key achievements of user privacy in social media. In particular, we review and compare the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of the privacy leakage attacks and anonymization algorithms. We overview the privacy risks from different aspects of social media and categorize the relevant works into five groups: (1) social graphs and privacy, (2) authors in social media and privacy, (3) profile attributes and privacy, (4) location and privacy, and (5) recommendation systems and privacy. We also discuss open problems and future research directions regarding user privacy issues in social media.