Found: Uncovering Personal Information Fields Through Twitter

Abstract

Social media is essentially inescapable in modern times. More and more people are creating accounts and making connections online, on an increasing number of social media sites. For each of these sites, a username is created and bits and pieces of personal information are given in order to construct a profile or for status updates. In this paper, we focus on how much personal information is revealed - particularly location information. The intuition is that even if a location is not explicitly given, such as through the profile, it can still be uncovered from status updates and links to other sites. Thus, our experiments center around Twitter users, their timelines, and the links they share. The site linked from Tweets of special interest is Instagram because of its close ties with location data. The belief is that if an Instagram account can be found for a Twitter user, then his location becomes increasingly more vulnerable (especially if it has not yet been revealed). Ultimately, we find that location information is frequently indirectly revealed, and overall there is a trend of users choosing to use similar user names with their actual names, and keeping that consistent across social networks.