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Top1. Introduction
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are online services, which are used by people to construct personal profiles, connect each other and share different content (Boyd and Ellison, 2010). OSNs facilitate the social interactions between individuals through using vary of services, such as posting, sharing, blogging, tagging, chatting, social searching and so on. This means, OSNs use the web 2.0 environment, which is basically developed based on a service-oriented architecture. This architecture supports integrating the business processes with customer, partner and/or third-party services to add a value to the business. For example, most of OSNs allow the third-party developers to create and integrate their applications through the Application Programming Interface (API). Furthermore, OSNs allow the tracking and advertising businesses to integrate their services using tracking cookies with OSNs services and user profiles. Therefore, OSNs are used as well as by organizations for advertising, marketing their services, communicating with potential and existing consumers, listening to the customers’ feedback and complaints, and promoting the events. This means, the uses of OSNs are a growing and diverse.
Mainly, OSNs are classified into four categories. First, connection OSNs that helps individuals keep in touch with their friends and families, such as Facebook and Twitter. Second, OSNs help professionals in a general group or a specific occupation to interact, such as LinkedIn. Third, academic OSNs, which help researchers, professors, students and teachers to share their research, projects, knowledge and academic content, such as Academia.edu. Fourth, multimedia OSNs that help individuals share videos and pictures, such as YouTube. In order to know the magnitude use of OSNs, in 2015, over 1.5 billion monthly active users use Facebook in 2015. In each day there are more than 300 million photos are uploaded and shared (Stanton et al., 2015). Twitter has over 200 million registered users, and over one billion tweets every five days (Twitter, 2011). YouTube has over four billion views every day and 60 hours of video are uploaded each minute (Youtube, 2012). Based on these statistics, we may know the importance of how these websites affect our daily life. Therefore, developing usable and secure OSNs has been become an urgent need.
OSNs have a set of characteristics, such as inconsistent variations of purposes of online social networks, the large number of security and privacy settings, lack experience of OSNs users, tension and loosen between desire of OSNs to stay open platform and desire of users to protect their personal information, variety services provided by OSNs, and a large number of personal accounts and content. All of these characteristics introduce a set of challenges; one of these challenges is the security and privacy taking into consideration of usability aspects (Zhang et al., 2010; Zilpelwar et al., 2012; Acquisti and Gross, 2006; Dwyer et al., 2007; Gross and Acquisti, 2005; Buchegger and Datta, 2009; Beye et al, 2010; Rosenblum, 2007; Motahari et al, 2007; Nov et al., 2009). For example, (Lipford et al., 2009) identified privacy issues that have arisen on OSNs by using contextual integrity. Furthermore, these issues associate with users’ profiles, newsfeeds, photos, and application platform in OSNs.
In order to deal with this challenge, there are many solutions have been proposed in different contexts. But some of these solutions were not effective because of lacking of usability (Fox and Naidu, 2009). So, usability is still a problem of interfaces of security and privacy policies. Therefore, to handle this challenge, usable security and privacy solutions are required. For example, user interfaces of privacy and security settings in Facebook have various problems because of complexity and usability. And also, increasing the number of services in OSNs require more security and privacy settings that need to be ease to use for configuring and understanding by users (Muñoz-Arteaga et al., 2011). Therefore, to achieve this goal, a systematic literature review was performed to investigate the existing solutions, open privacy and security issues with respect of usability taking into account the user-friendly interfaces and effective visual feedback, and the role of human factors in the secure OSNs design.
The main contributions in this paper are as follows: