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Privacy Leakage in Event-based Social Networks: A Meetup Case Study

Published: 06 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Event-based social networks (EBSNs) are increasingly popular since they provide platforms on which online and offline activities are combined. Despite the increasing interest in EBSNs, little research has paid attention to the privacy issues coming from the unique features of EBSNs; the on-site information of users is highly relevant to real lives. In this paper, we try to investigate privacy leakages in Meetup, one of the most popular EBSN service. More specifically, we answer what private information can be inferred from the site's publicly available data. To this end, we conduct a measurement study by crawling webpages from Meetup containing 240K groups, 8.9M users, 27M group affiliations and 78M topical interests. By analyzing the dataset, we find that LGBT status of users, which is one of the most sensitive privacy information, can be predicted with 93% accuracy. Finally we discuss the cause of the privacy leakage on EBSNs and its possible ensuing damages.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Privacy Research with Marginalized GroupsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555566:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)SoK: A Framework for Unifying At-Risk User Research2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833643(2344-2360)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2021)Related WorkEvent Attendance Prediction in Social Networks10.1007/978-3-030-89262-3_2(5-10)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021
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Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 1, Issue CSCW
November 2017
2095 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3171581
Issue’s Table of Contents
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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Publication History

Published: 06 December 2017
Published in PACMHCI Volume 1, Issue CSCW

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Author Tags

  1. computer supported cooperated work
  2. event based social network
  3. machine learning
  4. online social network
  5. privacy leakage

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Privacy Research with Marginalized GroupsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555566:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)SoK: A Framework for Unifying At-Risk User Research2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833643(2344-2360)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2021)Related WorkEvent Attendance Prediction in Social Networks10.1007/978-3-030-89262-3_2(5-10)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021
  • (2020)Do My Emotions Influence What I Share? Analysing the Effects of Emotions on Privacy Leakage in Twitter2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom50675.2020.00165(1228-1235)Online publication date: Dec-2020

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