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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?
1) People still assume that if don't sign their name on the internet then its anonymous. People need to be educated otherwise. Articles like this help.
2) While a lot of people are still grappling with #1 above, there are a lot of more sophisticated people who need to learn that even if they ARE behind 7 proxies, using tor, ssh, on a hacked wifi they are accessing via a pringles can-tenna from across state or even national lines... and then use that super anonymous connection to participate anonymously in 'social networking' sites like twitter, facebook, etc... even if they never reveal a single personal detail about themselves, their place within the social network itself can be reliably used to unmask them once they've had their anonymous account linked to real friends.
People REALLY need to be educated about this.
This.
However, I don't think a lot of people fully understand the negative side of placing your life online for all to see. They fail to realize that placing their discussion about smoking pot (or other dubious activity) on twitter might one day cause them a job.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
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.
Hi. I'm one of the authors. Please read our FAQ. It answers that very question. In short, our de-anonymization algorithm applies to far more than public social networks like twitter, including some very sensitive ones.
how 'bout not using twitter, myspace, facebook, etc??
don't you use those services to be noticed?
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton