Breaking the Privacy Kill Chain: Protecting Individual and Group Privacy Online

Online social networks (OLSNs) are electronically-based social milieux where individuals gather virtually to socialize. The behavior and characteristics of these networks can provide evidence relevant for detecting and prosecuting policy violations, crimes, terrorist activities, subversive political movements, etc. Some existing methods and tools in the fields of business analytics and digital forensics are useful for such investigations. While the privacy rights of individuals are widely respected, the privacy rights of social groups are less well developed. In the current development of OLSNs and information technologies, the compromise of group privacy may lead to the violation of individual privacy. Adopting an explorative literature review, we examine the privacy kill chain that compromises group privacy as a means to compromise individual privacy. The latter is regulated, while the former is not. We show how the kill chain makes the need for protecting group privacy important and feasible from the perspectives of social, legal, ethical, commercial, and technical perspectives. We propose a research agenda to help societies and organizations strike the proper balance between the benefits and costs of both OLSNs and investigative technologies.