Multi-facet Trust Model for Online Social Network Environment

Online Social Network (OSN) has become the most popular platform on the Internet that can provide an interesting and creative ways to communicate, sharing and meets with peoples. As OSNs mature, issues regarding proper use of OSNs are also growing. In this research, the challenges of online social networks have been investigated. The current issues in some of the Social Network Sites are being studied and compared. Cyber criminals, malware attacks, physical threat, security and usability and some privacy issues have been recognized as the challenges of the current social networking sites. Trust concerns have been raised and the trustworthiness of social networking sites has been questioned. Currently, the trust in social networks is using the singlefaceted approach, which is not well personalized, and doesn’t account for the subjective views of trust, according to each user, but only the general trust believes of a group of population. The trust level towards a person cannot be calculated and trust is lack of personalization. From our initial survey, we had found that most people can share their information without any doubts on OSN but they normally do not trust all their friends equally and think there is a need of trust management. We had found mixed opinions in relation to the proposed rating feature in OSNs too. By adopting the idea of multi-faceted trust model, a user-centric model that can personalize the comments/photos in social network with user’s customized traits of trust is proposed. This model can probably solve many of the trust issues towards the social networking sites with personalized trust features, in order to keep the postings on social sites confidential and integrity.