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Tagvisor: A Privacy Advisor for Sharing Hashtags

Published: 23 April 2018 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Hashtag has emerged as a widely used concept of popular culture and campaigns, but its implications on people»s privacy have not been investigated so far. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of privacy issues induced by hashtags. We concentrate in particular on location, which is recognized as one of the key privacy concerns in the Internet era. By relying on a random forest model, we show that we can infer a user»s precise location from hashtags with accuracy of 70% to 76%, depending on the city. To remedy this situation, we introduce a system called Tagvisor that systematically suggests alternative hashtags if the user-selected ones constitute a threat to location privacy. Tagvisor realizes this by means of three conceptually different obfuscation techniques and a semantics-based metric for measuring the consequent utility loss. Our findings show that obfuscating as little as two hashtags already provides a near-optimal trade-off between privacy and utility in our dataset. This in particular renders Tagvisor highly time-efficient, and thus, practical in real-world settings.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference
    April 2018
    2000 pages
    ISBN:9781450356398
    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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    • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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    International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

    Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

    Publication History

    Published: 23 April 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. hashtag
    2. location privacy
    3. online social networks

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    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

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    WWW '18
    Sponsor:
    • IW3C2
    WWW '18: The Web Conference 2018
    April 23 - 27, 2018
    Lyon, France

    Acceptance Rates

    WWW '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 170 of 1,155 submissions, 15%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    • (2023)Learning Privacy-Preserving Embeddings for Image Data to Be PublishedACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/362340414:6(1-26)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Multi-modal Representation Learning for Social Post Location InferenceICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC45041.2023.10279649(6331-6336)Online publication date: 28-May-2023
    • (2023)Adversary for Social Good: Leveraging Attribute-Obfuscating Attack to Protect User Privacy on Social NetworksSecurity and Privacy in Communication Networks10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_37(710-728)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2023
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    • (2022)Preliminary Analysis of Privacy Implications Observed in Social-Media Posts Across Shopping PlatformsProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3538969.3544457(1-10)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2022
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    • (2022)Predicting and Analyzing Privacy Settings and Categories for Posts on Social Media2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)10.1109/BigData55660.2022.10020677(5692-5697)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2022
    • (2021)RetaGNN: Relational Temporal Attentive Graph Neural Networks for Holistic Sequential RecommendationProceedings of the Web Conference 202110.1145/3442381.3449957(2968-2979)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
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