Empowering Evolving Social Network Users with Privacy Rights

Considerable concerns exist over privacy on social networks, and huge debates persist about how to extend the artifacts users need to effectively protect their rights to privacy. While many interesting ideas have been proposed, no single approach appears to be comprehensive enough to be the front runner. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and novel reference conceptual model for privacy in constantly evolving social networks and establish its novelty by briefly contrasting it with contemporary research. We also present the contours of a possible query language that we can develop with desirable features in light of the reference model, and refer to a new query language, PiQL, developed on the basis of this model that aims to support user driven privacy policy authoring and enforcement. The strength of our model is that such extensions are now possible by developing appropriate linguistic constructs as part of query languages such as SQL, as demonstrated in PiQL. Keywords-privacy; social network, evolving networks; content visibility; peer rules; exceptions; global accessibility;