A Conceptual Model of Privacy Exposure on Digital Social Networks

Resumen

A Digital Social Network is a group of people connected to each other through a software platform that allows each person to define their profile and communicate with others. The profile that a person defines in this Digital Social Network is called "digital biographical profile". The vulnerability concerning their privacy may be unknown to the users because they are not aware of the risks, they expose themselves to, due to the assumption of being supported by a platform "with established privacy protection conditions". Exposure on a digital biographical profile carries a great responsibility for people, as they must be the guardians of their privacy. The objective of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of digital biographic profiles, factors increasing exposure, and associated mitigation forms, to serve as a basis for the implementation of computerized user awareness tools. The proposed model can be used as a strategy to protect individuals from exposure on digital social networks, which allows for mitigating attacks that compromise their privacy and that of their environment.