Summary Access control can effectively protect users' data and privacy in social networks. Different access control models address different data privacy requirements, and the corresponding implementation technologies and performance are also quite different. The existing access control mechanisms of social networks rarely take into account the individual preferences of users, and cannot provide personalized services for users. Therefore, we have studied an analysis mechanism of user preference to quantify user preferences, and then use user preference values and some key information of users' social resources as decision vectors, and proposed an access control mechanism based on user preference (ACMBUP). ACMBUP turns the problem of access decision‐making into a problem of classification, that is, whether to allow access or not to allow access. At the same time, we add an encryption and decryption mechanism in ACMBUP to prevent data leakage and protect data when users interact with access mechanisms. Experiments show that this mechanism can automatically generate appropriate access control policies to meet the potential privacy needs of different users, so as to better protect the privacy of social networks data.

The rapid development of communication and network technologies including mobile networks and GPS presents new characteristics of OSNs. These new characteristics pose extra requirements on the access control schemes of OSNs, which cannot be satisfied by relationship-based access control currently. In this paper, we propose a hybrid access control model (HAC) which leverages attributes and relationships to control access to resources. A new policy specification language is developed to define policies considering the relationships and attributes of users. A path checking algorithm is proposed to figure out whether paths between two users can fit in with the hybrid policy. We develop a prototype system and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.