A machine learning based approach for user privacy preservation in social networks

With the development of Internet technology, service providers can provide users with personalized services to enrich user experience, however, this often requires a large number of users’ private data. Meanwhile, the protection of their private data and the evaluation of the risk of leaked datasets become a matter of great concern to many people. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we develop a machine learning-based approach in online social networks (OSNs) to efficiently correlate the leaked datasets and accurately learn millions of users’ confidential information. Moreover, a trust evaluation model is developed in OSNs to identify malicious service providers and secure users’ social activities via direct trust computing and indirect trust computing. Extensive experiments are conducted by using real-world leaked datasets, and the results show that the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of user privacy protection and accuracy of privacy leakage evaluation.