What is my privacy score? Measuring users’ privacy on social networking websites

Social networking websites usage is becoming popular these days among individuals and organizations. Several organizations and researchers started investigating how social networking websites can be used as a potential tool to innovate and improve the sales of products. However, in the hustle of using social networking sites, the users knowingly or unknowingly expose their personal data to unintended users. The literature identifies the need for privacy scores of a social networking website so that the users can easily identify the level of disclosure of their personal information on the website. Quantifying privacy on social networking websites is a new and trending area of research. We propose a novel approach to calculate the privacy score of a user on a social networking website. The calculated privacy score of the user takes into account the user’s personal profile attributes and settings along with the network characteristics of the social network.