We come to the last Blog for our course. In
the last few lectures, two SNA examples are introduced: PageRank and HITS.
PageRank is used by Google Internet search engine to assigns a numerical
weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents. This help to measure the
importance of a particular page.
A new idea – Semantic Web is also
introduced. Semantic Web promotes common formats for data on the World Wide
Web. The Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured
documents into a "web of data
In final lecture, it talks about Online
Social Networks and its Security and Privacy Issues. There are three main security
objectives in Online Social Networks. They are
- Privacy - protection of personal information, message in social network
- Integrity - the protection of data from being altered by unauthorized parties
- Availability - availability of user profiles is consequently required as a basic feature, even though considering recreational use
Beside these three aspects, I think Authentication
is another important issue in Security Issues of Online Social Networks. In Online
Social Networks, we often receive comment or request outside our social network.
For example, we receive a friend request in Facebook and he is a friend of my
friend, but I didn’t meet him before. How can I authenticate him? Can I trust
his profile?
Let’s consider below situation. I have a friend
called Peter. One day, a person called Peter sent me a friend request in
Facebook and his profile picture is Peter’s photo. I may accept his request
immediately with out further authentication. I think most of the people do the
same way liked me. However, this can be very dangerous. I didn’t authenticate
his identity and this may expose my personal information to him.
As Online Social Networks become more and
more important in our life, we are putting more and more information into the
social network. Our personal information becomes easier to be exposed into the
social network. Security and Privacy Issues become a very important issues in
Social network because the social network is growing too fast.
