Communications of the ACM
Location Data on Two Apps Enough to Identify Someone, Says Study
Researchers from Columbia University and Google say it is possible to identify individuals with a high degree of confidence by matching their movements across two social media datasets.
Credit: Kim Martineau
Individuals can be identified with a high degree of confidence by matching their movements across two datasets, according to a team of researchers at Columbia University and Google.
The team demonstrated geotagged posts on just two social media apps are enough to link accounts held by the same person. The researchers used an algorithm that calculates the probability one person posting at a given time and place also could be posting in a second app at another time and place.
The research, which was presented at the World Wide Web (WWW 2016) conference in Montreal, raises privacy concerns. "What this really shows is that simply removing identifying information from large-scale datasets is not sufficient," says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who was not involved in the study.
Columbia undergraduate students also built a related tool, You Are Where You Go, to enable individuals to audit their social media trail. The tool retraces users' steps and makes relatively accurate inferences about their age, income, and whether they have children.
From Columbia University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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