Equity-preserving Management of Privacy Conflicts in Social Network Systems

Social Network Systems (SNSs) allow users to easily share data and link them to other users. For the sake of privacy, users may define policies over these data, which can trigger conflicts with other users. It happens that the resolution of these conflicts lead to unfair situations. We propose a characterization of this unfairness by introducing the concept of equity in SNSs. This allows us to define an equity-preserving conflict management algorithm. We evaluate this algorithm using the Gini coefficient, which is a standard metric for inequity in economics. This evaluation shows that our approach leads to better results than classical conflict resolution strategies.