Online social networking is emerging as a primary means of communication, especially among the young. The rapid growth of available social networking services and users does not always correspond to a common awareness of the implications for security, privacy, and safety. This book explores the security and privacy aspects of online social networks and services.

This requires the definition of a new language, inherited and fused from many different fields including theory of computation, the social sciences, the traditional security field, and network and system engineering. The social networking services considered in this book range from social interaction websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, to services for information dissemination like Twitter; cases where social interaction is associated with other content (for example, Flickr and Amazon) are also included. The book is a collection of thematic studies divided into three complementary parts.

The first part focuses on fundamental aspects of security and privacy in social networks. The problem of privacy is defined from an interdisciplinary point of view, including legal, social, and computer-related aspects. Then, the new concept of digital identity is analyzed and contextualized within the requirements of remote communications. A peer-to-peer encryption scheme is proposed as a possible solution for confidentiality, to protect the privacy of users. Finally, some examples of crowdsourcing are investigated to explain the different perceptions of ethical cases between the offline and online worlds.

The second part is dedicated to mathematical models that can be used to study social dynamics, to detect manipulation or attacks aiming to extract information about the social interactions in the real world and use them to gain financial advantage. Attackers hope to “steal the reality” of a social network by slowly acquiring implicit social information, while remaining undetected.

The third and final part of the book presents some specific cases regarding the unique features of security and privacy in social networks, linking the social dimension to existing privacy and security issues. The link reconstruction attack is presented as an accurate method to reconstruct the structure of an unknown social network. The authors present two interesting cases that analyze the degree of anonymity in the Bitcoin system.

I found this book interesting and stimulating. It offers expert insight. The central chapters require the reader to have a mathematical background, while a basic knowledge of security, computer science, and the social sciences will also help. All of the chapters in this book are well referenced. The collection is not intended for beginners and requires a certain degree of confidence in the topics analyzed. Consulting other works [1,2] may also be helpful.