TOPIC 1 [2 people]

Survey on the Status of Privacy Specifications in Online Social Networks
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Study at least 8 online social networks (OSNs) (including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ 
and Flickr) and report of how each one of them handles privacy specifications.

The output of this study is expected to be: 

(1) A characterization of what a user is allowed to specify in terms of 
"what piece of information" (e.g., photo, wall post, status update, etc) 
is visible to "what type of users" (e.g., friends, friends-of-friends, lists, etc)
and what is the default setting.
As an example of the expected output of this study consider Table 1 in [1] but more detailed. 

(2) A ranking of the 8 OSNs with regards to "how much" private they are using one or more 
appropriate metrics, for example, using ideas from [2].  

Read [3] for some nice ideas on how to improve the current situation.

[1] Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari, Andrea Perego: 
Enforcing access control in Web-based social networks. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. 13(1): (2009)
[2] Kun Liu, Evimaria Terzi: A Framework for Computing the Privacy Scores of Users in Online 
Social Networks. TKDD 5(1): 6 (2010)
[3] Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Balachander Krishnamurthy. Addressing the Privacy Management 
Crisis in Online Social Networks. In The IAB Workshop on Internet Privacy, December 2010. (Position Paper)
 

TOPIC 2 [2 people]

Experimental Evaluation of the Privacy of a Real OSN
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Choose 2 real data sets from OSNs (or 2 different subsets of the same data set) 
and build the corresponding social network graphs.
Check the web page for some links of where to get datasets.

Then, evaluate the resulting graphs in terms of 
(1) k-degree anonymity [4], and
(2) an additional k-anonymity based criteria of your choice. 

[4] Kun Liu, Evimaria Terzi: Towards identity anonymization on graphs. 
SIGMOD Conference 2008: 93-106