Keynote: Data Protection in Social Networks: Going Beyond Access Control

Director DiSTA STRICT SociaLab, University of Insubria, Italy

With the increasing popularity of On-line Social Networks (OSNs), protection of personal information has gained attention in the research community. This has resulted in many proposals, ranging from access control models to tools for privacy settings suggestion. However, none of the research proposals appeared so far nor the privacy settings currently offered by commercial OSNs provides a comprehensive solution to the fundamental issue of unintended information disclosure to a public that can reach up to millions of users. One of the key reasons is that  the social web vision requires to deeply rethink access control and privacy enhancing technologies both in terms of models and architectural solutions for their enforcement. In this talk, after an introduction to the problem of data protection in OSNs, we will discuss the most challenging research questions and issues and report preliminary research results.

Elena Ferrari is a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Insubria, Italy and scientific director of the K&SM; Research Center and the STRICT SociaLab. Her research activities are related to various aspects of data management, including access control, privacy and trust, social networks, secure cloud computing and emergency management. In 2009, she received the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award for “outstanding and  innovative contributions to secure data management”. She is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.