User Perception of Security on Social Networking Sites Using Fuzzy Logic

Human nature often frowns on engaging or interacting with near strangers. However, on online social media networks, this is largely ignored. There is an open interaction among both known users and loosely-connected users, and as a result, the normal social barriers against interacting with strangers are lowered. This rather careless openness has resulted in the rampant increase in cybercrime and identity theft worldwide, awaiting a potential privacy disaster in the near future. Since users raise concerns about the privacy and the security of social media sites, there is the need to evaluate the perception that users have of the security on social media sites. This paper presents a technique for evaluating user perception of level of security on social networking sites using fuzzy logic. The inputs to the system were fuzzy sets representing linguistic variables for information security evaluation goals of confidentiality, integrity and availability. The IF-THEN rules were constructed using the Mamdani fuzzy reasoning technique and the defuzzification technique was done using the centroid technique. The implementation of the design was carried out using the MATLAB Fuzzy logic tool box. Using three of the popular online social networking sites namely, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn the results show a system that can effectively be employed to evaluate user perception of Information Security.