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Personal Information Disclosure of User-Profiles on Facebook

Facebook, the most popular and largest Online Social Network (OSN) is a virtual community where people interact and connect with each other by creating a profile and share opinions and interests in different ways. In recent years, we have witnessed a massive participation of people in these communities which has resulted in the generation and availability of large volumes of personal and sensitive data in the public domain. Public disclosure of this information has exaggerated worries about the loss of privacy. In this work, we study the exposure and pattern of information disclosure of user-profiles on Facebook to understand how secure and private the personal profile information is. To do so, we extracted the public profile information of 134K Facebook users and examined the same in terms of disclosure of information and privacy loss. Most of the personal information is permissive by default to external entities by Facebook. Although a user has the provision of customizing privacy controls to make the information restricted to his neighborhood. Our findings depict that most of the users have remained unaware of these privacy controls as we see a large volume of profile information is in the public domain. We conducted a statistical analysis of the user profile data to understand the type of information disclosed by most of the users. We also carried out a gender-wise and age-distribution analysis on the extracted data. Furthermore, we have also discussed an alternative approach to Facebook’s Graph Application Programming Interface (API) for obtaining profile data