International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

An Online Social Networking Site (OSNS) provides an easy way of interacting and sharing information with internet users across the globe. More than Millions of internet users have shared their personal and professional information publically over internet through these websites. On one hand these OSNS facilitate social interaction among the users while on the other hand it also introduce vulnerabilities like privacy invasion, identity theft and exposure of personal data such as photos, videos, email id, phone no. etc. to the other users on the network. This personal information available on the OSNSs can be misused by the attackers to perform malicious activities. The paper suggests architecture for improving privacy of any OSNS. Also a model is proposed that provide measures to protect users’ personal data from the attackers as well as service provider of OSNSs. The proposed model has incorporated the concept of public and private key cryptography for data encryption, key distribution and management which helps to eliminate the concept of third party, which can be a potential point of attack. Finally, the concept of Safe-Space as a secure and reliable model of OSNS from privacy point of view has been introduced to protect users on OSNS.