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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.'"

1 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who promised? Tsarkon Reports by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Well. Slashdot lies.

    I used to get moderator points until I got $rtbl-ed. (RTBL = real time black list).

    I have a high karma account in which I post "things that are likely to get moderated up." That way, when I have something insightful to say, and its compatible with the raging groupthinking censorship, I can get a spotlight.

    However, I used to post anonymous things that may not be compatible with Slashbotting group-think.

    Long story short: If you don't clear your cookies AND use a proxy, and you post anonymously in a bitch-slapped thread or get individually bitch-slapped by a moderator or your logged in username is associated with a bitch slapped or habitual troll IP you will never moderate again and be on $rtbl.

    Now my high-karma account no longer can moderate, it can meta moderate but no longer moderate. This $rtbl is hardly real time. Its a permanent ban.

    So here we are at slashdot. Where posting AC is flypaper: your real / logged in account WILL get $rtbl-ed if you start voicing things that piss off that crowd (which may in fact be true or genuinely insightful). You lose. You have no anonymous here, make sure you never use the browser you use to talk AC as you do to post logged in. Make sure you use some sort of a bounce or proxy if you think there is a good chance you will be a part of a bitch-slapped thread or make an AC post which the slashbotting public will moderate you down on.