# A Game Theory-Based Model for the Dissemination of Privacy Information in Online Social Networks
## 1 Introduction  
With the advancement of information technology, the interconnection structure of the Internet has experienced rapid growth. The number of users in online social networks (OSNs) has maintained steady growth, and the level of activity of users has increased as well [1]. According to the \"Global Digital Report 2021\" released by We Are Social, there are currently about 4.66 billion users worldwide, among which 4.2 billion are social media users [2]. As the largest OSN platform in the world, Facebook has continued to expand its user base, contributing to the accelerated spread of information on the Internet. Meanwhile, social media users are facing increasingly more threats to information security and privacy violations [3]. Therefore, the prevention of malicious and widespread privacy information dissemination has become an urgent issue.  
Although increasingly more attention has been paid to digital privacy protection on the Internet, research on privacy protection is in its early stage. The majority of the research on the dissemination of information has mostly focused on the analysis of the trend of the dissemination of public opinions. While the research on privacy information dissemination in OSNs is still in its early stage, most of the research is focused on the macro level of the network, while little is on the micro level of user psychology. In addition, little research has applied the game theory to study the dissemination of privacy information, to the best of our knowledge, nor has it used any game theory model to describe the micro-level factors regarding the dissemination of privacy information.  
The aim of this paper is to study how privacy information disseminates in OSNs by taking into account the impact of micro-relationships between users, transforming different types of relationships into specific parameter indicators, and developing a game theory-based model to facilitate the study of the dissemination of privacy information. Our work also includes carrying out some experiments to evaluate the game theory-based model and validate the model using some real data from the Facebook network. Experimental results show that the game theory-based model that we proposed in this paper can be effectively used to study the dissemination of privacy information in OSNs. Such studies can help better understand the ways or patterns of privacy information dissemination in OSNs, which is important for the development of effective mechanisms or policies for the protection of privacy during the sharing of information in OSNs.  
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews some related work. Section 3 analyzes the factors that influence privacy information dissemination and introduces the implementation process, game setup process, and specific structure of the privacy information dissemination model. Section 4 explores the influence of privacy information dissemination rules through comparative experiments and analysis to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. Section 5 concludes this paper with some suggestions for future research.