ABSTRACT
Social networks as an entity unto themselves are a fairly modern concept that has taken advantage of the benefits provided by the Internet to become one of the most popular recent phenomena. In fact, it may not be a stretch to say that the defining technology of the current decade-if not century-is the social network. Not only has Google launched its own (beta) version of a social network in Google+, but also mobile phones natively send data to the existing social networks, and desktop applications come preinstalled on new computers. Even the social network leaders are integrating with each other-Twitter will reproduce your tweets to your Facebook status feed or your LiveJournal blog. However, the utility of social networks has extended far beyond the average Internet user’s activities on Facebook. Researchers have created social networks from such unique data sets as Enron’s electronic mails, and used them to analyze fraud within that company. It is exactly this ability to use social network analysis-even on data sets that are not conventional social networks-to determine hidden information that makes them so valuable and so dangerous.
