مدیریت محتویات اجتماعی در شبکه های اجتماعی آنلاین
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Decentralized Online Social Networks: overview and key research challenges
3- Social data representation: an overview
4- Data availability
5- Information diffusion
6- Privacy and Security
7- DOSNs: current proposals
8- Conclusions and open problems Conflict of Interests
References
Abstract
The widespread diffusion of Online Social Networks has given unforeseen opportunities for their users to share contents and mutually interact. However, current platforms offer inadequate guarantees as far as concerns the privacy of their users. To address these issues and leave to the users more control on their data, several recent proposals suggest to decentralize the storage of social data, aiming at leaving their control entirely to their owners. This approach has lead to the definition of Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs), ranging from completely decentralized solutions, i.e. P2P solutions, to hybrid systems integrating external and private resources for storing user data. While DOSNs allow users to have more control over their data, they raise new challenges concerning the management and availability of social data. Guaranteeing data availability in a highly dynamic environment, defining proper algorithms for information diffusion and guaranteeing data privacy in a distributed setting are currently open problems in this area. This survey presents an overview of these challenges and of the main solutions presented in the literature. Existing proposals are classified taking into account the strategies adopted to manage social data, focusing on the data availability and on information diffusion. The survey also presents the new privacy issues arising in DOSNs. Finally, an overview of the main open issues in this research area is presented.
Introduction
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are nowadays one of the most popular applications in the Internet. They have attracted a huge amount of users during the last years by changing the way people communicate and interact. Facebook can be considered the most representative OSN with, at the beginning of 2018, more than 2 billion active users, and the highest number of daily users connections. OSNs provide several services [1] offering to their users the opportunity of building a public profile, looking up new friends among the registered users, establishing relationships, and sharing content. Furthermore, these platforms also allow sharing of information within groups of users and the possibility of building communities of users characterized by common interests. One of the major problems of current OSNs, which are mainly developed on centralized platforms, concerns the privacy of the users’ data. Indeed, social data are stored in centralized servers, and the companies running the OSNs, use these data for commercial goals. In May 2015, a report1 commissioned by the Belgian Data Protection Authority based on the analysis of OSN policies and terms-of-use, concluded that Facebook gives users a false sense of control over their data privacy. More recently, it has been evident to the general public that Facebook data might have been sold without any consent of the legitimate owners. These are only few examples of several legal issues that involve not only Facebook, but also further OSNs, like Twitter, or Google+. Furthermore, centralized OSNs may suffer of other problems, like limited scalability and high maintenance costs to manage data of large number of users [2].