Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Can ID Anonymous Twitterers
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.'"
Who ever promised this data would be anonymous? Do you really expect privacy when posting personal stuff on line, even if you don't sign your name in advance?
John
Must... cover... everything...
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Slashdotters care about privacy. People on these social networking sites want their lives to be on show for everyone. I don't think people who twit every 5 minutes where they are and what they are doing are really to concerned about their privacy.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Willyhill managed to ID fourteen Twitter accounts. Or is this something completely different?
Are there really any surprises here? Social networks behave a lot like the Internet, with many routes pointing to your front door.
For example, use whatever falese names you want. Your email address makes a dandy primary key squirreled away in all your friends mailboxes, just waiting for Facebook to Hoover it up and join the dots.
Your privacy and anonymity is defined by the aggregate social stupidity of your friends.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
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.
We have an FAQ about this paper. It answers many of the misconceptions expressed in the comments here. In particular, our algorithm applies to much more than public social networks like twitter and flickr. A variety of networks including the phone call network are being shared behind your back in anonymous form, and our de-anonymization techniques apply just as much. You'll probably agree that people expect more privacy there. See my blog for a variety of demonstrations and thought-experiments of de-anonymization.
as someone whose every thought I have no interest in reading.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
no they dont give a rats ass about you...
they are after me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/26/seth-finkelstein-google-advertising
"Google recently took another step along the path of surveillance as a service, launching what it called "interest-based advertising", and which everyone else calls "behavioural targeting". These are systems that collect extensive personal data, for marketing purposes. To best understand the issues,"
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001422.html
I once upon a time worked for a statistics agency and even without names and addresses it is surprisingly easy to identify people in anonymous data, even anonymised unit record data can be deconstructed to some degree. Depending on what you want to achieve don't even need to identify them.
Marrying up these datasets and ideas would be gruesome.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
David who? Smarty pants....
Maybe David the Goliath.
FreeBSD bounties
The application to twitter anonymous accounts is creative, but otherwise it's a standard timing attack. If user A is active while anonymous data B is passed, user A has a higher chance of having generated data B than the rest of the population.
Looks like there's some number-crunching using timing of past tweets and whatnot to see if the user is likely to be on, too. I like that.
Or it could be I'm completely misreading it.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Maybe it was a tar baby.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This & other tricks are possible, yes, but *harder*. I really don't have the creds to pull the tech side of your Point 2, but I have quietly worked to keep the other side down to a whisper, earning strange looks from friends who can't imagine why I Just Don't Wanna Share.
The Mayans got lucky. Their 2012 date is just accidentally shaping up to be the Data Implosion.
~tag: "Let's give everyone what used to be studio grade cameras in their phones, 12 types of mechanisms and reasons to aggregate and pummel cyberspace with pictures of everyone doing everything, while also creating a whole second group of users posting (presumed) anonymously, followed by 35 governments becoming Big Brothers, then losing control of the data!"
As you folks have said, when that tsunami hits the shore, Social Ethics as we know it goes to pieces.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Obviously, you know almost nothing about anonymizing yourself. The admin (and oftentimes, moderators) of ANY site/board can go into his admin tools, and find out A: all the IP's from which you have logged into his site and B: all the posters who have logged in from each and every IP that poster has ever used With nothing more than those two sets of data, the admin/mod can make some pretty good guesses just who the heck you REALLY are. More, your browser sends information in ADDITION TO your IP - as well as Java, Flash, and other plugins. Google "TOR Bundle" Look it over, learn it's features, and you will BEGIN TO understand anonymous browsing. But, be aware - the features are ALL USELESS unless you understand them, and use them properly. IF, and/or WHEN you understand the features of that full bundle, THEN you MIGHT know how to trick /. and other sites into believing that you ain't you. But, only if you also acquire the discipline needed to use the tools properly. Meanwhile, stop your whining. No one appreciates you drooling on the floor, and the admins here know exactly who you are. They are laughing at yet another idiot post by a known idiot.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I wonder what the accuracy would be if you just scanned for posts referencing new pictures at flickr?
"she took her action as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years for her action, she also suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store..." - From Wikipedia
It was not a mass protest event. She just had enough that day, and wasn't bowing to an unjust law regardless of the consequence.