Research helping make social media posts more private

Computer scientists at Lancaster University are working on smarter 'privacy setting' algorithms to prevent embarrassing photos being shared on social media. Currently, when updates and photographs are posted on sites such as Facebook only the person that posted is able to set the privacy settings - even when there are other people in the image, mentioned in a comment, or invited to an event. "This is a massive and serious problem as users' individual privacy preferences for co-owned items, such as photos, usually conflict, so applying the preferences of only one party risks these items being shared with undesired recipients," says Dr Jose Such, Lecturer at Lancaster University's School of Computing and. "This can lead to privacy violations, which in some cases can have severe consequences such as people losing their jobs or being cyberstalked." In a paper, 'Resolving multi-party privacy conflicts in social media', published by the journal IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, researchers have shown it is possible to automatically detect when conflicts over privacy settings will occur when social media posts are made. This research also demonstrates that algorithms can be used to drastically reduce the number of conflicts that have to be resolved manually. When a clash of privacy settings happens it is currently down to the individuals concerned to communicate with each other - via messaging, email or phone calls - to resolve the issue. Dr Such, lead researcher on the paper, said: "Computational mechanisms that can automate the negotiation process have been identified as one of the biggest gaps in privacy management in social media.