A Privacy-Preserving Architecture for the Protection of Adolescents in Online Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy-preserving system architecture with guardian avatars to protect adolescents from online social network threats while maintaining user privacy and enabling parental oversight.

Contribution

It presents a novel user-centric architecture and systematic design process for safeguarding minors on social networks without compromising their privacy.

Findings

Developed a Family Advice Suite with Guardian Avatars.

Implemented a system architecture for privacy-preserving adolescent protection.

Addresses privacy concerns in parental control tools.

Abstract

Online social networks (OSN) constitute an integral part of people's every day social activity. Specifically, mainstream OSNs such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are especially prominent in adolescents' lives for communicating with other people online, expressing and entertain themselves, and finding information. However, adolescents face a significant number of threats when using online platforms. Some of these threats include aggressive behavior and cyberbullying, sexual grooming, false news and fake activity, radicalization, and exposure of personal information and sensitive content. There is a pressing need for parental control tools and Internet content filtering techniques to protect the vulnerable groups that use online platforms. Existing parental control tools occasionally violate the privacy of adolescents, leading them to use other communication channels to avoid moderation. In this work, we design and implement a user-centric Family Advice Suite with Guardian Avatars aiming at preserving the privacy of the individuals towards their custodians and towards the advice tool itself. Moreover, we present a systematic process for designing and developing state of the art techniques and a system architecture to prevent minors' exposure to numerous risks and dangers while using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on a browser.