A group trust metric for identifying people of trust in online social networks

With the growth of social network services, the need for identifying trustworthy people has become a primary concern in order to protect users’ vast amounts of information from being misused by unreliable users. In this study, we propose the extended Advogato trust metric that facilitates the identification of trustworthy users associated with each individual user. By incorporating the strength of social relationships, we recursively diffuse a capacity of a target user throughout his/her personal network. Based on the capacity propagation, this paper also presents the capacity-first maximum flow method capable of finding the strongest path pertinent to discovering an ordered set of reliable users and preventing unreliable users from accessing personal networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach has advantages over existing representative methods in terms of both the discovery of reliable users and the preventability of unreliable users.

► We model a trust metric incorporated with the strength of social relationships.
► The metric involves the propagation mechanism via personal social networks.
► We employ the capacity-first maximum flow to rank trustworthy users.
► Our trust metric has advantages in identifying reliable users.
► Our trust metric is also useful for preventing unreliable users.