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USERS PRIVACY EXPOSURE PROTECTION ON SOCIAL MEDIA
YAN LIU1,ˈńHIA-MING LIU2, RUNG-CHING CHEN2,*ˈSHU-YI WANG3
1
School of Management, Library and Information Science, Tian Jin Normal University,TianJin,10065,China
2
Information Management, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan
3
School of Management, Tian Jin Normal University, TianJin,10065,China
E-MAIL: Lindayan5588@163.com, kevin50201a@gmail.com *crching@yut.edu.tw nkwshuyi@gmail.com
Abstract:
The rapid development of the Internet has brought great
convenience to users, but it also brought a lot of troubles to
the users' information privacy exposure. This study selects the
basic information of 300 users on FACEBOOK social media to
cluster analysis. The data sets of users are divided into five
groups by experiment, and the clustering results are classified
and then discussed. By the analysis of the basic information of
the users, the risk factors of the users' basic information
exposure are searched. At last, this study provides users with
substantive recommendations for the healthy development of
social media.
Keywords:
Social Media; Information Exposure; Privacy Protection;
K-means
1. Introduction
With the Internet growing, mobile Internet has deeply
affected people's social behavior. The dimension and the
possibility of users exposed to the network environment is
greatly increased. The threat of user information exposure
has become an important problem related to the vital
interests of every Internet users. Under the influence of the
powerful intelligent terminal, various service applications,
the growing role of network and other factors, more and
more users information are inevitable to be confronted with
the initiative, unintentional or malicious disclosure.
According to "China National Rights Protection Survey
Report 2016", 54% of Internet users think that personal
information disclosure is serious, of which 21% of Internet
users think it is very serious and 84% of Internet users
personally feel the adverse effects caused by information
exposure. According to the research, 47% of Internet users
have met the "social media posing as friends and family
scam" situation, and a considerable number of the Internet
users received fraud information and suffered the loss of

` 
*&&&

money. [1]
As a result of the rapid development of Computer,
network and other information technology, data of social
media operators have been exponential growing. These
microscopic data publicized become a form of public
offerings, but since data publishers cannot control how users
use data, neither do they know whether the information
exposure will bring Internet users a certain risk [2]. Web
service providers want to use as much privacy information
as possible to get more benefits, and some stakeholders want
to earn more profits, thus the content of the user's
information is held by multiple parties. Therefore, users
need to grasp control of the privacy in their own hands to
ensure their own privacy are safe. It can be seen that the
in-depth study of privacy issues is of great practical
significance.
The existence of social media provides a good research
environment for the user privacy problem study, it not only
has a very close situation to the reality in user scale, social
relations, complex structure, behavior law but also a model
easier to obtain, easier to analyze, easier to verify and other
characteristics. As people pay more and more attention to
privacy protection, how users' privacy and security can be
effectively guaranteed has been a hot topic in the recent
study. Hundreds of social media have more than 10 million
users. For example: Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, Wechat,
Weibo and so on. And with the "Internet +" developing,
small social media products continue to emerge, then the
source of social media is not clear, making the user's privacy
more difficult to be protected. So the study of social media
users’ basic information exposure research is particularly
important.
2. Related Work
At home and abroad, people attach great importance to
social media research. And the aspects of the study are very
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broad. From the perspective of user behavior, Wang, Na and
Xu, Dachen[3] used the questionnaire star in the
investigation of the protection of personal information in
mobile social networks, and carry out a sampling survey. In
the survey, 535 were valid questionnaires. Analysis of the
survey results reveals that five aspects of user behavior
influence personal information security. Respectively, (1)
setting personal information associated with the user to be a
password and using the same password on multiple social
media; (2) installing social media software from unknown
sources of while not constantly update the system security
software; (3) forbidding the use of terminal system privacy
control; (4) worrying about unknown information disclosure
but often activate the GPS function; (5) being more inclined
to upload privacy data to the network disk. These five
aspects of user behavior will increase the possibility of
privacy exposure[3].
Wang, Shuyi and Zhu, Na[4] put forward new
challenges to the Internet users’ privacy study in the mobile
social media user privacy protection strategy research. They
hold the idea that besides identity, health, family and social
relations, the location of mobile social media users,
information publicized by service providers, posting status
to expose users’ privacy, hackers’ are also involved. Based
on the above issues, the author proposed the government,
industry associations, service providers and users themselves
and other aspects collaboratively protect the user privacy[4].
From the perspective of social media user privacy, Zhu,
Hou[5] in the "social media users’ psychological reaction to
privacy protection research" took the domestic and foreign
important journals as the objects of study to analyze the
relevant literature about user's privacy psychology and
created an integrated model of privacy concerns. Objects
were divided into the anterior variables (Privacy experience,
privacy awareness, personality differences, demographic
characteristics, culture), the results variables (regulation,
behavioral response) and the adjusted variables (privacy
calculation, trust)[5].
Longfei Guo[6] took emergence and media report as
the objects of study. constructed social network privacy
concerns dynamic image factor model, observed changes in
user privacy concerns, compared single man’s concerns with
groups’, explored the different results caused by different
functions of social media. At a result, they found regular
patterns of social network privacy attentions. In addition, the
evolutionary game model of privacy protecting
Liwen Wang[11] used Python to extract hot topics and
participants’ information from the Sina microblogging , and
then used the hierarchical clustering algorithm to extract the
hot topics clustering. At the same time, the collaborative
filtering algorithm was used to analyze the extracted data.
The results of the two algorithms are analyzed and compared.

Through the results, the same class of topic or the user's
most interesting topic can be recommended, which made
Sina microblogging topic function used more frequently[11].
From the perspective of social media operators,
Cheng-Hung Tsai, Han-Wen Liu etc. [12] proposed the
information explosion, users use various social networking
sites to interact through social network. Users connect to
various forms of social networking sites anytime, anywhere
through the Internet connection, thus social media operators
can clearly know the user's information and social relations.
Through the understanding of the user's personal preferences
and interests, social media operators recommend the user's
personal ads, products, articles and other diversified
personal social services. This way not only meets the needs
of users, but also increases the product's click-through rate
and exposure. This article bases on the tones people used in
the social network, obtain data from three access--the user
fan page, the user graffiti wall message information, friends’
home page. The data is used for analysis of personal
preferences, and considering the amount of personal
data ,the paper find the personal preferences category from
different groups, so as to recommend personal advertising
and product recommendation services better. Through the
actual verification, the research results are significantly
improved [12].
From the perspective of user privacy exposure,
Mohamed Bourimi, Ricardo Tesoriero etc.[13] proposed the
privacy and security issues of the multi-modal user interface
for social media applications. The proposed method
describes how the privacy and security issues are modeled
from the perspective of the user interface, and how this
model is developed with a four-level conceptual framework
for multi-modal, multi-platform user interfaces. The
approach also explained how these models can be adapted to
the development of social media applications. Finally the
author used this model as a social media application to show
the feasibility of the model[13].
Elena Zheleva, Lise Getoor proposed that in order to
solve the privacy problem, many social media sites allow
users to hide their personal files from the public. How do
data users use the online social network mixed with public
and private user profiles to predict the user's private
attributes? According to the relationship between the
classifications of the relationships, they infer the user's
sensitive information through the public information. In
addition to links between friends, groups, the study found
that in several well-known social media sites, the use of
link-based and group-based classification research on social
networking privacy issues mixed with public and private
user profiles can accurately restore the users’ private
profiles[14].
Eden Litt [15] suggested that every day hundreds of
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millions of people log on social networking sites and
generate TB-level data. How do social networking sites use
technology to protect the privacy of users? The results show
that the technology on the social networking site is
intermediary communication, which is between the user and
the operator. The development of privacy limits and the
technology are controlled by people. Ultimately people can
identify privacy inequality, some of whom are more likely to
take advantage of the technology to protect their privacy, but
there are also some personal information and reputations that
may face more risk than others[15]. In addition, Sweeny
promoted K-anonymity (K-anonymity) processing before
the release of micro-data is can effectively reduce the
probability of personal information disclosure[16].
Priyadarshini Lamabam and Kunal Chakma[17]
proposed a way by code mixing and code switching, as well
as two or more languages in the exchange process at the
same time being used. Based on previous research, for such
a mixed code for language recognition, because of existence
of informal text (such as creative spelling and phonetic
input), the text is difficult to accurately identify. The author
uses natural language processing methods to automatically
identify mixed social media text. In the study of
cross-language social media, the author selected Twitter and
Facebook to show the mix of codes between English and
Manipuri, compared the Trigram model and the conditional
random field (CRF) model, to find which model can more
accurately identify the language[17].
[18] used text analysis in data mining for emotional
analysis in social media texts. The collected data sets are
divided into words and sentences, and then the weights of
the two classes are calculated to form the final text model.
JAVA technology is used to evaluate the performance of the
model through the different performance parameters and the
system in which the proposed system is trained by accuracy,
error rate, storage space, training time and test time. The
author attempted to promote the automatic identification
model by using this model through subsequent research[18].
3. Materials and methods
The amount of Facebook's monthly active users
exceeded 1.7 billion, and the amount of active users also
broke through 1.1 billion. Facebook has a huge amount of
active users, a lot of social media text and provide an open
API access to data.
Based on the existing research results, although some
scholars use the data mining for social media text analysis,
domestic study lacks the choice of Facebook as a research
example and aspects of the user information exposure. Some
foreign researchers now use the data mining, machine

learning and other methods to build the model for data
collection research, from the perspective of the data
inequality user and social media operators to obtain,
cross-language text analysis, a variety of social media text
analysis, Operators’ obtaining user information for product
marketing and other aspects of research. According to the
existing research results of scholars, users’ privacy are
severely exposed to the public view. There is few mature
research system for social media user privacy. And the
existing user information exposure research empirical
research is rare. Therefore, this study based on the social
media user information exposure that is great significance
issue of privacy protection.
This paper selects the data with which users register for
basic information operations research, delimits exposure
level of the users’ basic information. When browsing the
basic information of Facebook users, the basic information
of the user is shown in Table 1. In Table, “1” is the user to
expose this information which is dangerous and “0” is not
dangerous but “0+” is a little bad.
According to the basic information exposed, this paper
selects the most basic 10 variables. The basic information of
Facebook users is the most likely to affect the user privacy
exposure. There are work experience, education, living place,
mailbox and phone, birthday, gender, family members,
emotional status and user avatar. Set 0 as the definition of
the starting point for work experience and education. Based
on the amount of information exposed, this paper tries to
establish a model that reflects the factors and the types of
attack in the process of information exposure.
Through empirical research, this study aims at
providing users with optimization strategies to reduce the
possibility of attack and a basis for long-term healthy
development.
4. Experiments and results
Entry the basic information of 300 users into the R
software and use K-means for grouping. By k-means
clustering algorithm, this paper divided 300 users’ data into
five groups. The Quantities were 14, 91, 43, 143, 9.ġ The
following results can be obtained by analyzing the grouping
results.ġ The first group of features are mainly in the work,
education background, place of residence, birthday, family
members and these features are exposed more. The second
group of features are mainly in the work, education
background, family members and these features are exposed
more. In the third group, work and family members are not
exposed. There were much exposure in education
background and few exposure in telephone numbers.ġ The
characteristics of the fourth group mainly manifested in the
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few exposure in work, education background and much
information disclosure in family members.
The exposure of the fifth group exists mainly in the
work, education background, but family members are rarely
exposed. These five groups are defined for user information
exposure hazard levels from danger to safety level. The
fourth group for the fifth level, the first group for the fourth
level, the second group for the third level, the fifth group for
the second level, the third group for the first level .The first
level is the safest one.

TABLE 1: Facebook users record information of field name and sub-field name

Facebook user basic information Dangerous level

Work experience 0+
Professional skills 0
Education 0+
Living place 0+
Contact information E-mail 1
iphone 1
Basic Information Birthday 1
Gender 1
Blood type 0
Sexual orientation 0
Other social networking sites 0
Family member 0+
Relationship status 1
Details About user information 0
Favorite aphorism 0
Memorabilia 0
Profile picture 1

FIGURE 2. K-means clustering results and grouping diagrams

FIGURE 1. R K-means grouping results
Through the grouping of the attributes exposed to the user
information, it is determined which variables the user's
exposure information is mainly focused on, and the harmful
effects of the centralized variables on the exposure of the user


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information. And then put forward the corresponding
countermeasures, the future users in the use of social media
how to protect the user's information privacy.
Privacy protection is an important issue in the global
Internet governance, the user will pay more attention to
information privacy and thus affect the adoption of
information systems. This is also one of the reasons why our
social media users use satisfaction decline. The average age
of users showing an upward trend. Therefore, for social
media operators, should improve the user experience at the
same time, to further eliminate their privacy concerns, such
as adding more privacy exposure options, inform the users of
their privacy information. At the same time, it should start
from the national level, one is to recognize the importance of
personal information protection. If users privacy and security
are not enough, that will affect their use of information
systems, so that the negative use of the network platform will
even resist the use. The second is to strengthen the protection
of adolescent privacy information and education, since
childhood there is the importance of privacy protection. The
third is in the personal information protection legislation to
clear the scope of personal information for a variety of
collection, transmission and use of personal information
channels and platforms. The operation of a strong legal
definition and the elimination of information privacy are high
user concerns about privacy risks.
5. Conclusion
According to the data of 300 users, we can see that there
are more users belonging to the third group and the fifth
group. According to the dangerous level defined by us, we
also have more user groups for the first and second levels
respectively. Users belonging to the third, fourth and fifth
groups should pay attention to the exposure of information,
such as work, education background, birthday, family
members and other basic information.
This paper only selects the basic information of 300
users for empirical research, and has some limitations in the
research of data set. At the same time, the use of supervised
learning methods for dealing with the data will produce a
certain human and the choices of basic information data set
may also have some irresistible factors.
In the following study, researchers have to establish the
user's basic information exposure model and expand the
training data set at the same time. The future research will not
be limited to the user's basic information exposure, but
contain the user's comments, the user's location information
and so on. The study is looking forward to providing a more
secure service.

Acknowledgments
This paper is supported by the national youth social
science fund project "study of social media user privacy
protection based on information prices dynamically
revelation " (project approval number: 15CTQ017)
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