A Systematic Mapping Study on Social Network Privacy: Threats and Solutions

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are becoming pervasive in today’s world. Millions of people worldwide are involved in different forms of online networking. However, this ease of use of OSNs comes with a cost in terms of privacy. Users of OSNs become victims of identity theft, cyberstalking, and information leakage, which are real threats to privacy. These threats can obtain a user’s personal information and disclose it for malicious purposes. To understand how researchers are addressing this question, the state of the art of the existing privacy threats in OSNs described in the literature and the existing academic research-based solutions to address such threats were reviewed. To this end, we performed a systematic mapping study to identify, classify and analyze them. From the initial set of 1,117 papers, we selected and extracted 45 publications reporting different threats and solutions. Based on this, this is the first systematic mapping study, to provide: a) well-defined categories of specific privacy threats in the OSN domain; and b) the available academic solutions for preventing these threats. Our results serve as a guide for researchers and analysts in academia and industry to understand the most important privacy threats in OSNs and make moves towards mitigating them.