Personal media continues to drive the growth of home computing and consumer electronics. Equipped with various appliances, home users continue to create enormous quantities of photos, home videos, song collections, or blog pages. This new landscape has led to new challenges facing home users -- managing their personal data, searching it to find objects of interest,and sharing the data with family and friends. These challenges have motivated the emergence of a new class of web sites, such as MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube to help users manage and share their personal content online. However, there is a mismatch between people's needs for sharing personal content and what today's online applications offer. Most sharing sites restrict users to a specific type of content. While sharing personal content warrants the need for restricting access, most sites offer only two basic policies.

 

People can either enumerate all the site-specific user IDs who should have access or they can make the content publicly available to anyone. Iin addition, users must now create and maintain several copies of their social network: one for each online site. Our work offers a social networking-based access control scheme suitable for online sharing of personal media. Using Flickr as an example, we illustrate how today's online applications can use our scheme to provide new forms of access control for personal media.