Social Networking Privacy—Who’s Stalking You?

Abstract

This research investigates the privacy issues that exist on social networking sites. It is reasonable to assume that many Twitter users are unaware of the dangers of uploading a tweet to their timeline which can be seen by anyone. Enabling geo-location tagging on tweets can result in personal information leakage, which the user did not intend to be public and which can seriously affect that user’s privacy and anonymity online. This research demonstrates that key information can easily be retrieved using the starting point of a single tweet with geo-location turned on. A series of experiments have been undertaken to determine how much information can be obtained about a particular individual using only social networking sites and freely available mining tools. The information gathered enabled the target subjects to be identified on other social networking sites such as Foursquare, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+, where more personal information was leaked. The tools used are discussed, the results of the experiments are presented and the privacy implications are examined.

Keywords

• Twitter
• Tweets
• StreamdIn
• Twitonomy
• Creepy
• geo-location
• stalking
• identity theft
• data leakage
• Facebook
• Foursquare