Related papers: How Unique and Traceable are Usernames?
Usernames are ubiquitous on the Internet, and they are often suggestive of user demographics. This work looks at the degree to which gender and language can be inferred from a username alone by making use of unsupervised morphology…
Users on Twitter are commonly identified by their profile names. These names are used when directly addressing users on Twitter, are part of their profile page URLs, and can become a trademark for popular accounts, with people referring to…
Large numbers of people all over the world read and contribute to various review sites. Many contributors are understandably concerned about privacy; specifically, about linkability of reviews (and accounts) across review sites. In this…
Social media users often hold several accounts in their effort to multiply the spread of their thoughts, ideas, and viewpoints. In the particular case of objectionable content, users tend to create multiple accounts to bypass the combating…
Social networks have the surprising property of being "searchable": Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a…
With the growing popularity and usage of online social media services, people now have accounts (some times several) on multiple and diverse services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Publicly available information can be used…
User identity linkage across online social networks is an emerging research topic that has attracted attention in recent years. Many user identity linkage methods have been proposed so far and most of them utilize user profile, content and…
User identification has been a major field of research in privacy and security topics. Users might utilize multiple Online Social Networks (OSNs) to access a variety of text, videos, and links, and connect to their friends. Identifying user…
Matching the profiles of a user across multiple online social networks brings opportunities for new services and applications as well as new insights on user online behavior, yet it raises serious privacy concerns. Prior literature has…
People search is an important topic in information retrieval. Many previous studies on this topic employed social networks to boost search performance by incorporating either local network features (e.g. the common connections between the…
How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains…
When evaluating the cause of one's popularity on Twitter, one thing is considered to be the main driver: Many tweets. There is debate about the kind of tweet one should publish, but little beyond tweets. Of particular interest is the…
This article reviews the problem of degree of closeness and interaction level in a social network by ranking users based on similarity score. This similarity is measured on the basis of social, geographic, educational, professional, shared…
Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular. Social media appeals to users due to its fast dissemination of information, low cost, and easy access. However, social media also enables the widespread of fake news.…
This study deals with a fairly simply formulated problem -- how to estimate the number of people bearing the same full name in a large population. Estimation of name popularity can leverage personal name matching in databases and be of…
We perform an analysis of the way individual users navigate in the Web. We focus primarily in the temporal patterns of they return to a given page. The return probability as a function of time as well as the distribution of time intervals…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
We linked names and contact information to publicly available profiles in the Personal Genome Project. These profiles contain medical and genomic information, including details about medications, procedures and diseases, and demographic…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
This paper investigates when users create profiles in different social networks, whether they are redundant expressions of the same persona, or they are adapted to each platform. Using the personal webpages of 116,998 users on About.me, we…