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Researchers Can ID Anonymous Twitterers

Posted by timothy on from the 140-shady-characters dept.

narramissic writes "In a paper set to be delivered at an upcoming security conference, University of Texas at Austin researchers showed how they were able to identify people who were on public social networks such as Twitter and Flickr by mapping out the connections surrounding their network of friends. From the ITworld article: 'Web site operators often share data about users with partners and advertisers after stripping it of any personally identifiable information such as names, addresses or birth dates. Arvind Narayanan and fellow researcher Vitaly Shmatikov found that by analyzing these 'anonymized' data sets, they could identify Flickr users who were also on Twitter about two-thirds of the time, depending on how much information they have to work with.'"

11 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who promised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Fine, who am I?

  2. Re:Who promised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    or me?

  3. Re:Who promised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Clearly, you're both me.

  4. Tin foil! by mc1138 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Must... cover... everything...

    --
    The musings of just another geek and his junk.
  5. This is new technology to me by moteyalpha · · Score: 3, Funny

    I understand networks and how you can get somebody's IP and translate it to a location or identify them with algorithms that analyze sentence structure or even use some TCP packet tricks.
    The thing that confuses me is the acronym "FRIEND", I have looked in all my technical references and I can't find that tool.

  6. Re:Who promised? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I read that and thought "19? did he just pull that out of his ass? 1 2 3... 19! He actually counted the number of words in the quoted text!"

  7. I can ID anyone using Twitter by FlyingSquidStudios · · Score: 2, Funny

    as someone whose every thought I have no interest in reading.

    --
    http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
  8. Re:Who promised? by Slumdog · · Score: 1, Funny

    Fine, who am I?

    But I know what dude I am. I'm the dude playin' the dude, disguised as another dude.

    --
    FreeBSD bounties
  9. Re:Rats... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    no they dont give a rats ass about you...
    they are after me.

  10. Re:Twits by Animaether · · Score: 4, Funny

    They fail to realize that placing their discussion about smoking pot (or other dubious activity) on twitter might one day cause them a job.

    That's right - The Netherlands are hiring again!

  11. Re:Who promised? by EdIII · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's why Larry Craig tapped his toe in an airport bathroom in a stop-over airport - low likelihood of running into someone who might know him.

    I thought it was just because he had a "wide stance".