Fine-Grained Privacy Setting Prediction Using a Privacy Attitude Questionnaire and Machine Learning

Abstract : This paper proposes to recommend privacy settings to users of social networks (SNs) depending on the topic of the post. Based on the answers to a specifically designed questionnaire, machine learning is utilized to inform a user privacy model. The model then provides, for each post, an individual recommendation to which groups of other SN users the post in question should be disclosed. We conducted a pre-study to find out which friend groups typically exist and which topics are discussed. We explain the concept of the machine learning approach, and demonstrate in a validation study that the generated privacy recommendations are precise and perceived as highly plausible by SN users.