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The City Privacy Attack: Combining Social Media and Public Records for Detailed Profiles of Adults and Children

Authors:

Keith W. RossAuthors Info & Claims

COSN '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks

Pages 71 - 81

https://doi.org/10.1145/2817946.2817957

Published: 02 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Data brokers have traditionally collected data from businesses, government records, and other publicly available offline sources. While each data source may provide only a few elements about a person's activities, data brokers combine these elements to form a detailed, composite view of the consumer's life. The emergence of social media gives data brokers unprecedented opportunities to enhance their profiles. Data brokers are increasingly interested in combining the information collected from offline sources with information publicly available in social networks to profile not only adults but also children.

In this paper, we show how data brokers and other third parties can combine online and offline data sources -- namely, public Facebook profiles and voter registration records -- to create detailed profiles of adults, teens, and children in any target city in the US. We outline and execute an approach that leverages a Facebook user's social ties combined with the city's voter registration records to infer the Facebook users who reside in the city. These inferences enable a data broker to create detailed user profiles, which not only include information publicly available from Facebook but also the user's exact residential address, date and year of birth, and political affiliation.

We further show how additional inferences can be made from the combined data. We then discuss how this city attack can be extended to create detailed profiles of minors and children. Finally, we make recommendations to Facebook, municipal authorities, and individuals to decrease the risk of this large-scale privacy breach.

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Index Terms

The City Privacy Attack: Combining Social Media and Public Records for Detailed Profiles of Adults and Children
1. Security and privacy
  1. Human and societal aspects of security and privacy
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy
    1. Privacy policies

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

COSN '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks

November 2015

280 pages

ISBN:9781450339513

DOI:10.1145/2817946

General Chair:
Aneesh Sharma
Twitter, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Rakesh Agrawal
Data Insights Laboratories, USA
,
Matthias Grossglauser
EPFL, Switzerland

Copyright © 2015 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 ACM 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: 02 November 2015

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National Science Foundation

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COSN'15

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ACM

COSN'15: Conference on Online Social Networks

November 2 - 3, 2015

California, Palo Alto, USA

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COSN '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 82 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 307 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1049/blc2.12091
Laine TDuong NLindvall HOyelere SRutberg SLindqvist A(2022)A Reusable Multiplayer Game for Promoting Active School Transport: Development StudyJMIR Serious Games10.2196/3163810:1(e31638)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.2196/31638
Wei XXu GWang HHe YHan ZWang W(2020)Sensing Users’ Emotional Intelligence in Social NetworksIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2019.29446877:1(103-112)Online publication date: Feb-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2019.2944687
Wolfowicz MPerry SHasisi BWeisburd D(2020)Faces of radicalism: Differentiating between violent and non-violent radicals by their social media profilesComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2020.106646(106646)Online publication date: Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106646
Venkatadri GSapiezynski PRedmiles EMislove AGoga OMazurek MGummadi K(2019)Auditing Offline Data Brokers via Facebook's Advertising PlatformThe World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3308558.3313666(1920-1930)Online publication date: 13-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3308558.3313666
Adithia MYudhistira E(2019)Data Mining Based Privacy Attack Through Paper Traces2019 International Conference on Sustainable Engineering and Creative Computing (ICSECC)10.1109/ICSECC.2019.8907076(105-110)Online publication date: Aug-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSECC.2019.8907076
Wei XLi JHan ZWang W(2019)Predicting Users’ Emotional Intelligence with Social Networking DataSecurity and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data10.1007/978-981-15-0758-8_15(191-202)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2019
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Gong NLiu B(2018)Attribute Inference Attacks in Online Social NetworksACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/315479321:1(1-30)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2018
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Venkatadri GAndreou ALiu YMislove AGummadi KLoiseau PGoga O(2018)Privacy Risks with Facebook's PII-Based Targeting: Auditing a Data Broker's Advertising Interface2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP.2018.00014(89-107)Online publication date: May-2018
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Jia JWang BZhang LGong NBarrett RCummings RAgichtein EGabrilovich E(2017)AttriInferProceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/3038912.3052695(1561-1569)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3038912.3052695

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