ABSTRACT
Online social networks are online applications that allow their users to connect by means of various link types. Since their inception in the mid-to late-1990s, social networks have provided a way for users to interact, reflective of social networks or social relations among, for example, people who share interests or activities. Initially, critics regarded social media as a fad, a temporary fashion. However, today, social media has demonstrated exponential growth, making it the most popular activity on the World Wide Web. As the increase in popularity of social networking is on a constant rise, new uses for the technology are frequently being observed. As a result of the proliferation of these social networks, there is a critical need to securely store, manage, share, and analyze massive amounts of complex (e.g., semistructured and unstructured) social media data to determine patterns and trends in social communication, to better safeguard the nation and improve the quality of health care. The emerging cloud computing model attempts to handle massive amounts of data. Facebook has developed the Hive cloud-based relational data management framework, and Google has introduced the MapReduce framework for processing large amounts of data on commodity hardware. Furthermore, Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is emerging as a superior software component for cloud computing, combined with integrated parts such as MapReduce. However, state-of-the-art social media do not provide adequate security mechanisms to protect sensitive data and provide defenses against malicious attacks. Two major areas that are at the forefront of the social media revolution are the development of (i) data analytics technologies for analyzing these networks and extracting useful information such as location, demographics, and sentiments of the participants of the network, and (ii) security and privacy technologies that ensure the privacy of the participants of the network, as well as providing controlled access to the information posted and exchanged by the participants.
