Privacy settings on a social network

[adambedford]

I'm writing a mini social network and I'm having trouble figuring out how to deal with privacy settings.

I have established a range of privacy options (level 1-4):

• 1. Only Facebook friends can see profile (users connect via FB)
  
• 2. Only current classmates
  
• 3. Past + current classmates
  
• 4. All users in given group
  

 

I am writing a function to return a list of available users based on a given parameter (eg. Find all classmates of a user). Obviously I have to respect users privacy settings, so I thought to query against all users with level 2 permissions, however I realise that I may miss out some classmates who are FB friends but have permission levels set to 1.

 

Secondly, I'm looking to find out the relationship between two users (a function that I can plug in 2 user IDs and return their relationship...classmates, FB friends, past classmates, no relationship) which I can then use to determine whether a user has permission to view another users profile.

 

I don't have much code as of yet, because I spent a long time exploring one avenue which I now realise to be the wrong one!

 

Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated!