Social media users sometimes expose their friends to confidentiality and safety breaches. To what extent are companionable users vulnerable to security breaches in social networking sites? How should access to social networks and security risks be balanced for individual friendly users? Gundecha and others investigate these fascinating questions.

The theory of vulnerability and its reduction in social networks in this paper is predicated on privacy settings that reveal the personal information of users, and unintended consequential actions by users and friends that reveal information about other friends and family members. The individual (I-index) vulnerability of each attribute in the profile of a user is the degree to which the user enables it to be visible to others in a social network. A user poses the risk of divulging an attribute of friendly users in a profile community (C-index) to the extent to which all other users of a social network can trace the attribute. The nonvisible privacy or visible publicity (P-index) vulnerability is a measure of the degree to which the users protect themselves and friends in a social network. The vulnerability (V-index) of users relies on their own privacy settings, as well as those of their friends and families in a social network.

The authors use the pertinent information from the I-index, C-index, P-index, and V-index of users to derive theorems and equations for computing the most vulnerable friends to defriend, to maximize vulnerability and minimize the losses of each user in social networking sites. They perform a variety of experiments with a Facebook dataset to investigate the accuracy of the vulnerability reduction measures and algorithms. The results reveal that the proposed alternative strategies for defriending at least the most vulnerable friend would make all social contact users at least more secure to vulnerabilities. Undeniably, shoddy users who make new friends on social networks can become more vulnerable. The authors provide numerous approaches for pinpointing the utmost number of susceptible friends to defriend, to reduce vulnerability and the risk of losing social network contacts at suitable levels. I strongly encourage all managers of social networking sites to use the insightful ideas in this paper to investigate user vulnerabilities across networks.