How did you know that about me? Protecting users against unwanted inferences

The widespread adoption of social computing applications is transforming our world. It has changed the way we routinely communicate and navigate our environment and enabled political revolutions. However, despite these applications’ ability to support social action, their use puts individual privacy at considerable risk. This is in large part due to the fact that the public sharing of personal information through social computing applications enables potentially unwanted inferences about users’ identity, location, or other related personal information. This paper provides a systematic overview of the social inference problem. It highlights the public’s and research community’s general lack of awareness of the problem and associated risks to user privacy. A social inference risk prediction framework is presented and associated empirical studies that attest to its validity. This framework is then used to outline the major research and practical challenges that need to be addressed if we are to deploy effective social inference protection systems. Challenges examined include how to address the computational complexity of social inference risk modeling and designing user interfaces that inform users about social inference opportunities.