My project is on the issue of collective privacy management in social networking websites. Social networking has gotten huge over the decade, and the issue of privacy management has gotten as equally important in recent years. Most social networking sites only have privacy features set up for the individual. The research I will be doing is to see what kinds of privacy features are in place in the most popular social networking websites, and to see if there is evidence of any sort of group or collective privacy features on these sites. We will then create a survey to be given out to a population to see if people are genuinely interested in some sort of collective privacy management tool in the social networking sites they use.

A program is being developed simultaneously that's purpose is to generate collective privacy policies based on groups of similar individuals in the event that they do not set a collective privacy policy themselves (due to laziness or confusion.) The program is also supposed to determine which user features (ex: age, gender, location, etc.) have more correlation to similar privacy policies. I'll be helping and observing a PhD student who is working on this code, to see the different ways similar research questions are being answered.