research-article

On Profile Linkability despite Anonymity in Social Media Systems

Authors:

Michael Backes,

Pascal Berrang,

Krishna P. Gummadi,

Praveen ManoharanAuthors Info & Claims

WPES '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society

Pages 25 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/2994620.2994629

Published: 24 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

A number of works have recently shown that the privacy offered by pseudonymous identities on social media systems like Twitter or Reddit is threatened by cross-site identity linking attacks. Such attacks link the identities of the same user across websites. Therefore, assessing linkability, i.e., the risk that identities are linked across different websites, remains an important open problem. In this work, we analyze whether anonymity within a single social media site can protect a user from being linked across sites. To this end, we first introduce a relative linkability measure ranking identities within a social media site by their anonymity. We show that anonymity alone is not sufficient to assess linkability risks, by evaluating this measure on a data set comprising 15 million comments gathered from the Reddit social media system.

Second, we mitigate this insufficiency and present our absolute linkability measure, which in addition utilizes information about matching identities. Then, we confirm the validity of this measure on our data set. The measure is able to accurately assess the linkability risk in almost 75% of the cases and, more importantly, is shown to never underestimate the linkability risk.

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Cited By

Senette CSiino MTesconi M(2024)User Identity Linkage on Social Networks: A Review of Modern Techniques and ApplicationsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.350037412(171241-171268)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3500374
Gardner DTanenbaum T(2023)The access control double bind: How everyday interfaces regulate access and privacy, enable surveillance, and enforce identityConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/1354856523119370630:3(1186-1218)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231193706
Nunes VBrás JCarvalho ABarradas DGallagher KSantos N(2023)Enhancing the Unlinkability of Circuit-Based Anonymous Communications with k-FunnelsProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36291401:CoNEXT3(1-26)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3629140
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On Profile Linkability despite Anonymity in Social Media Systems
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security services
    1. Pseudonymity, anonymity and untraceability
  2. Software and application security
    1. Social network security and privacy

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cover image ACM Conferences

WPES '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society

October 2016

198 pages

ISBN:9781450345699

DOI:10.1145/2994620

General Chairs:
Edgar Weippl
SBA Research, Austria
,
Stefan Katzenbeisser
TU Darmstadt, CYSEC, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati
Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 October 2016

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CCS'16: 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 24, 2016

Vienna, Austria

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WPES '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 14 of 72 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 106 of 355 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Senette CSiino MTesconi M(2024)User Identity Linkage on Social Networks: A Review of Modern Techniques and ApplicationsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.350037412(171241-171268)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3500374
Gardner DTanenbaum T(2023)The access control double bind: How everyday interfaces regulate access and privacy, enable surveillance, and enforce identityConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/1354856523119370630:3(1186-1218)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231193706
Nunes VBrás JCarvalho ABarradas DGallagher KSantos N(2023)Enhancing the Unlinkability of Circuit-Based Anonymous Communications with k-FunnelsProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/36291401:CoNEXT3(1-26)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3629140
Hassanpour AUtsash MYang BRokne JWang D(2023)The Impact of Linkability On Privacy LeakageProceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1145/3625007.3627832(364-370)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625007.3627832
Rixen JColley MAskari AGugenheimer JRukzio E(2022)Consent in the Age of AR: Investigating The Comfort With Displaying Personal Information in Augmented RealityProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502140(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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Reagle J(2022)Disguising Reddit sources and the efficacy of ethical researchEthics and Information Technology10.1007/s10676-022-09663-w24:3Online publication date: 10-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09663-w
Cao LYu ZLiu YCao S(2021)An Identity Privacy Protection Scheme in LTE-WLAN Heterogeneous Converged NetworkIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30808399(78356-78367)Online publication date: 2021
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Li YJi WGao XDeng YDong WLi D(2021)Matching user accounts with spatio-temporal awareness across social networksInformation Sciences10.1016/j.ins.2021.04.030570(1-15)Online publication date: Sep-2021
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Mbarek AJamoussi SBenHamadou A(2021)Tuser3: A Profile Matching Based Algorithm Across Three Heterogeneous Social NetworksAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-3-030-65390-3_16(191-206)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2021
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Liang XGuo YGuo Y(2020)A Global Optimal Model for Protecting PrivacyWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-020-07110-xOnline publication date: 22-Jan-2020
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