Twitter’s vast metadata haul is a privacy nightmare for users

guest · Jul 10, 2018

Twitter’s vast metadata haul is a privacy nightmare for users
Working with publicly available metadata from Twitter, a machine learning algorithm was able to identify users with 96.7 per cent accuracy
July 9, 2018
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-metadata-user-privacy

Metadata is everywhere. Everything you tweet, every picture you take, and every status update you post on Facebook. It’s used by police and security forces to identify people who try to hide their identities and locations, while associated metadata in selfies can inadvertently ensnare criminals unaware that the data can destroy their alibi.

Even when muddling up to 60 per cent of the metadata, the model could still pinpoint a single person with more than 95 per cent accuracy.
Being anonymous won't help
The researchers took a corpus of five million Twitter users and ran 14 pieces of metadata from their tweets (including the time the account was created, the time a tweet was published, and the number of favourites, followers and following) through three different machine learning algorithms.

[...] It showed that it’s possible to identify with near-precise accuracy an individual using just a handful of pieces of metadata.
Click to expand...

mirimir · Jul 10, 2018

Well, "being anonymous" without strong compartmentalization is impossible. I mean, I had a Twitter account for a while. Under a different persona. Which was only weakly compartmentalized from Mirimir. Given that Mirimir never had a Twitter account, I doubt that Twitter data could link them. Even though many of you likely could. And given that I've never had a Twitter account as my meatspace persona, I doubt that Twitter data could link to me either. Or anyone, for that matter

But anyway, you can't be anonymous if your Twitter account posts pictures that you take locally in meatspace. Especially selfies! Who could imagine that one could be anonymous on Twitter after posting a selfie? And followers? How could one expect to be anonymous if meatspace contacts are followers?

Bloody fools, all of them

guest · Jan 11, 2019

Your Old Tweets Give Away More Location Data Than You Think
January 10, 2019
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-location-data-gps-privacy/

An international group of researchers has developed an algorithmic tool that uses Twitter to automatically predict exactly where you live in a matter of minutes, with more than 90 percent accuracy.

[...] 2015. Now, users must opt-in to share their precise location [...] But the GPS data people shared before the update remains available through the API to this day.
By analyzing clusters of coordinates, as well as timestamps on the tweets, LPAuditor was able to suss out where tens of thousands of people lived, worked, and spent their private time.

"The advancement here is that they studied two types of locations—work and home—rather than one, and they did a larger study with a more systematic evaluation and a more highly tuned algorithm, so it got the right answer a higher percentage of the time," Kautz says
And yet, Polakis says the fact that Twitter no longer attaches GPS coordinates to all geotagged tweets isn't enough, given that developers still have access to years' worth of data from before 2015.
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"The Privacy Risks of Public Location (Meta)Data" (PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.00897.pdf

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Twitter’s vast metadata haul is a privacy nightmare for users

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