Yeslam Al-Saggaf, Md Zahidul Islam







Privacy in Social Network Sites (SNS): The threats from data mining

This paper explores the potential of data mining as a technique that could be used by malicious data miners to threaten the privacy of SNS users and makes a moral case for the users' right to privacy. It applies a data mining algorithm to a hypothetical dataset of a sample of individuals from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen to show the ease at which characteristics about the SNS users can be discovered and used in a way that could invade their privacy. It is hoped by exploring the threats from data mining on individuals' privacy and arguing for users' right to privacy, the study will raise SNS users' awareness about the ways in which information that they reveal online can be used by malevolent data miners to harm them and how to operate in SNS safely

Keywords: privacy, Social Network Sites (SNS), data mining


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Note on the contributor

Yeslam Al-Saggaf is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) and a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology at the School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering (with honours) in Computer and Information Engineering, from Malaysia, and a Master's in Information Technology and a PhD from Charles Sturt University, Australia. His research interests lie in the areas of privacy in social media and ICT ethics. He has published in those areas in a number of international refereed journals as well as presenting at a number of international conferences. His current research project focuses on professionalism in the ICT workplace. Contact details: School of Computing and Mathematics, Boorooma Street, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia. Email: yalsaggaf@csu.edu.au.

Md Zahidul Islam is a Research Fellow at the Center for Research in Complex Systems (CRiCS) and Lecturer in Computer Science at the School of Computing and Mathematics, Faculty of Business, Charles Sturt University. He has received his Bachelor's degree in Engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh, Graduate Diploma in information science from the University of New South Wales, Australia and PhD in Computer Science (thesis titled Privacy preservation in data mining through noise addition) from the University of Newcastle, Australia. His main research interests include privacy issues for online communities caused by data mining, privacy preserving data mining, application of data mining techniques, and various data mining algorithms including classification, clustering, missing value imputation, data cleansing and data pre-processing. Email: zislam@csu.edu.au. Web: http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~zislam/.