The relativity of privacy preservation based on social tagging

Privacy preservation has gained importance with the development of tools for personal information retrieval and social information sharing in Web 2.0 environments. This paper addresses the need for a paradigm shift concerning publicity and privacy together in the process of personal information service and privacy preservation. In addition, we also bridge the conflict between interactivity and independency in the process of social sharing and privacy preservation. By analyzing the paradigm and conflict, we identify the criteria of privacy relativity, such as publicity vs. privacy and interactivity vs. independency. Using hierarchical clustering methods, we analyze the hierarchical community characteristics of tag networks which reflect users’ preferences and the features of information resources through social tagging. Based on the hierarchical communities of tag networks and relevant parameters of partitions such as the k of k-clique and the number of communities N at a certain level, we can determine and adjust the degree and the scope of users’ preferences and the features of information resources which can be revealed according to users’ permissions. The adjustment process can reflect the trade-off between privacy preservation and information access. We believe that this work will prove to be an important first-step toward the personalization and socialization of security policies in Web 2.0 environments.