Content Based Access Control in Social

A string of incidents on the news involving users of social network sites (SNSs) that unknowingly expose their private information to the public form the basis of this Master Thesis. It seems that many people are unaware of the audiences that have access to the content that they share on these SNSs or that they are unmotivated to pay attention to privacy policies for their content. This is the main problem addressed in this thesis. First an extensive research is done that includes an analysis of existing SNSs (containing a definition, feature description, and a detailed look at their privacy settings and data management). The research phase continues with a detailed look at the available access control mechanisms (methods that determine who are granted access to certain digital content and who are not). The research phase leads to the proposition of a new method driven by content based access control. The method automatically proposes an appro