Decentralized privacy preserving services for Online Social Networks

Current popular and widely adopted Online Social Networks (OSNs) all follow a logically centered architecture, by which one single entity owns unprecedented collections of personal data in terms of amount, variety, geographical span, and richness in detail. This is clearly constituting one of the major threats to users privacy and to their right to be-left-alone. Decentralization has then been considered as the panacea to privacy issues, especially in the realms of OSNs. However, with a more thoughtful consideration of the issue, it could be argued that decentralization, if not designed and implemented carefully and properly, can have more serious implications on users privacy rather than bringing radical solutions. Moreover, research on Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) has shown that there are more challenges to their realization that need proper attention and more innovative technical solutions. In this paper, we discuss the issues related to privacy preservation between centralization and decentralization, and we provide a review of available research work on decentralized privacy preserving services for social networks.