document: Exploiting vulnerability to secure user privacy on a social networking site As ( one 's ) social network expands , a user 's privacy protection goes beyond his privacy settings and becomes a social networking problem . In this research , we aim to address some critical issues related to privacy protection : Would the highest privacy settings guarantee a secure protection ? Given the open nature of social networking sites , is it possible to manage one 's privacy protection ? With the diversity of one 's social media friends , how can one figure out an effective approach to balance between vulnerability and privacy ? We present a novel way to define a vulnerable friend from an individual user 's perspective is dependent on whether or not the user 's friends ' privacy settings protect the friend and the individual 's network of friends ( which includes the user ) . As a single vulnerable friend in a user 's social network might place all friends at risk , we resort to experiments and observe how much security an individual user can improve by unfriending a vulnerable friend . We also show how privacy weakens if newly accepted friends are unguarded or unprotected . This work provides a large-scale evaluation of new security and privacy indexes using a Facebook dataset . We present and discuss a new perspective for reasoning about social networking security . When a user accepts a new friend , the user should ensure that the new friend is not an increased security risk with the potential of negatively impacting the entire friend network . Additionally , by leveraging the indexes proposed and employing new strategies for unfriending vulnerable friends , it is possible to further improve security and privacy without changing the social networking site 's existing architecture .
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