Privacy Preservation of Social Network Data

The publication of social network data necessitates a privacy threat for their users. The emerging popularity ofsocial networks has generated fascinating data management and data mining problems. Such social networks are of interest toresearchers from several disciplines like sociology, psychology, marketing research, or epidemiology. Now a day, a largeamount of social network data has been released in different ways. Since social networks usually contain private information,a vital concern in publishing these data for study is their privacy. Sensitive information related to users of social networksshould be protected. Having some local knowledge concerning users of a social network, an attacker may easily thrash theprivacy of some victims. Simply removing the identities of nodes before releasing the social network data does not guaranteeprivacy. Hence, it is required to anonymize the data before its publication so as to address the need to respect the privacy ofthe individuals whose sensitive information is included in the data. Typically Data anonymization trades off with utility.Hence, it is needed to find a golden path in which the released anonymized data still holds enough utility, while protecting