We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree distribution, centrality measures, scaling laws and distribution of friendship.
With respect to data collection aspects, the work by @cite_33 on OSNs (in particular on Facebook) is closely related to our work.
@cite_33
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We have seen tremendous growth in online social networks (OSNs) in recent years. These OSNs not only offer attractive means for virtual social interactions and information sharing, but also raise a number of security and privacy issues. Although OSNs allow a single user to govern access to her his data, they currently do not provide any mechanism to enforce privacy concerns over data associated with multiple users, remaining privacy violations largely unresolved and leading to the potential disclosure of information that at least one user intended to keep private. In this paper, we propose an approach to enable collaborative privacy management of shared data in OSNs. In particular, we provide a systematic mechanism to identify and resolve privacy conflicts for collaborative data sharing. Our conflict resolution indicates a tradeoff between privacy protection and data sharing by quantifying privacy risk and sharing loss. We also discuss a proof-of-concept prototype implementation of our approach as part of an application in Facebook and provide system evaluation and usability study of our methodology. Online Social Networks (OSNs) have recently emerged as one of the most effective channels for information sharing and discovery due to their ability of allowing users to read and create new content simultaneously. While this advantage provides users more rooms to decide which content to follow, it also makes OSNs fertile grounds for the wide spread of misinformation which can lead to undesirable consequences. In order to guarantee the trustworthiness of content sharing in OSNs, it is thus essential to have a strategic investigation on the first and foremost concern: the sources of misinformation. In this paper, we study k-Suspector problem which aims to identify the top k most suspected sources of misinformation. We propose two effective approaches namely ranking-based and optimization-based algorithms. We further extend our solutions to cope with the incompleteness of collected data as well as multiple attacks, which mostly occur in reality. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our approaches achieve competitive detection ratios in a timely manner in comparison with available methods. Extensive research has been conducted on top of online social networks (OSNs), while little attention has been paid to the data collection process. Due to the large scale of OSNs and their privacy control policies, a partial data set is often used for analysis. The data set analyzed is decided by many factors including the choice of seeds, node selection algorithms, and the sample size. These factors may introduce biases and further contaminate or even skew the results. To evaluate the impact of different factors, this paper examines the OSN graph crawling problem, where the nodes are OSN users and the edges are the links (or relationship) among these users. More specifically, by looking at various factors in the crawling process, the following problems are addressed in this paper:* Efficiency: How fast different crawlers discover nodes links;* Sensitivity: How different OSNs and the number of protected users affect crawlers;* Bias: How major graph properties are skewed.To the best of our knowledge, our simulations on four real world online social graphs provide the first in-depth empirical answers to these questions. Not all of the over one billion users of online social networks (OSNs) are equally valuable to the OSNs. The current business model of monetizing advertisements targeted to users does not appear to be based on any visible grouping of the users. The primary metrics remain CPM (cost per mille---i.e., thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click) of ads that are shown to users. However, there is significant diversity in the actions of users---some users upload interesting content triggering additional views and comments leading to further cascades of action. Beyond direct impressions, a user's action can generate indirect impressions by actions induced on friends and other users. Identifying the valuable user segments requires examination of profile data, friendships, and most importantly, their activity. Here we explore an alternate approach for measuring the value of users in OSNs by proposing a framework from the viewpoint of a popular OSN. Using a real dataset on the social network and activities of users, we show that a small subset of actions are likely to be key indicators of a user's value. Additionally, by examining the current targeting demographics available in Facebook, we are able to explore the relative (monetary) value that different users represent to the OSN.