Sharing and hiding online secrets: Using social relation and tag ontology in social software access control

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to manage access control tasks to satisfy the user privacy needs of online information resources according to social relations and tags.

Design/methodology/approach

The study proposes a method for access control management in the online social context. The proposed method includes the access control policy management process, metadata of access control policies, the data of ontologies, tags, and social relations, and conflict detection rules.

Findings

Online information sharing and hiding, which needs to consider social relations and mentioned topics, is a unique context and needs a novel access control mechanism. Ontologies are powerful and expressive enough to identify conflicts in access control policies. The paper provides a method using ontologies to control the access control activities based on social relations and tags on web content. The effectiveness of the method's conflict detection rules is validated through several scenarios.

Research limitations/implications

To make the proposed method suitable for widespread usage, further work is required to develop an access control policy specification and conflict detection tool. The proposed method introduces relatively novel usage scenarios, which consider social relationships, and tags compared with existing access control methods for online information sharing.

Practical implications

The proposed access control mechanism can be integrated into existing web sites. Online users can use this method to share information more easily than at present.

Originality/value

The method enables flexible access control in social contexts and handles unavoidable conflicts. It also opens the way to new access control scenarios in online social activities. The method can be used to keep secrets hidden from selected people.

Citation

Liu, C. (2010), "Sharing and hiding online secrets: Using social relation and tag ontology in social software access control", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 3, pp. 377-394. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011054044

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