Abstract

World wide web has been progressively evolving to a large-scale social medium platform. Web technologies have advanced to enable multimodal social interactions. With expanding interaction modalities and applications, elucidations of human interactions in web-based environments have been gaining importance in both research and commerce. Numerous technologies and methods for collecting sensitive user data, ranging from basic personal data to extensive behavioral and interaction characteristics of individuals and groups, have been developed. The data is used for constructing detailed profiles containing personally identifiable information, interaction histories, and behavioral features. The profiles have various commercial uses; from personalization of web interfaces, to behaviorally targeted advertising, to exploitation of users. Large pools of sensitive data and expanding social dimensions of web present numerous privacy threats, concerns and challenges. Challenging issues span from social throughout legal to technological aspects of social web. Despite the importance of the matter, rigorous interdisciplinary academic investigations are scarce. This study attempts to fill the gap in multidisciplinary elucidation of privacy challenges at the intersections of contemporary technological enablers, expanding social web principles, and legislative measures.