Identifying hidden social circles for advanced privacy configuration

With the dramatic increase of users on social network websites, the needs to assist users to manage their large number of contacts as well as providing privacy protection become more and more evident. Unfortunately, limited tools are available to address such needs and reduce users' workload on managing their social relationships. To tackle this issue, we propose an approach to facilitate online social network users to group their contacts into social circles with common interests. Further, we leverage the social group practice to automate the privacy setting process for users who add new contacts or upload new data items. We evaluate our approach using real-world data collected through a user study. The study also includes an analysis of the properties that are most critical for privacy related decisions.