Related papers: Facebook Shadow Profiles
Information sharing on social networks is ubiquitous, intuitive, and occasionally accidental. However, people may be unaware of the potential negative consequences of disclosures, such as reputational damages. Yet, people use social…
Social networks have become an increasingly common abstraction to capture the interactions of individual users in a number of everyday activities and applications. As a result, the analysis of such networks has attracted lots of attention…
High-latency anonymous communication systems prevent passive eavesdroppers from inferring communicating partners with certainty. However, disclosure attacks allow an adversary to recover users' behavioral profiles when communications are…
Online social networks provide a platform for sharing information and free expression. However, these networks are also used for malicious purposes, such as distributing misinformation and hate speech, selling illegal drugs, and…
Following the trend of data trading and data publishing, many online social networks have enabled potentially sensitive data to be exchanged or shared on the web. As a result, users' privacy could be exposed to malicious third parties since…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
Ensuring privacy of users of social networks is probably an unsolvable conundrum. At the same time, an informed use of the existing privacy options by the social network participants may alleviate - or even prevent - some of the more…
The internet can be broadly divided into three parts: surface, deep and dark. The dark web has become notorious in the media for being a hidden part of the web where all manner of illegal activities take place. This review investigates how…
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to…
Large language models (LLMs) have traditionally relied on static training data, limiting their knowledge to fixed snapshots. Recent advancements, however, have equipped LLMs with web browsing capabilities, enabling real time information…
Compromising social network accounts has become a profitable course of action for cybercriminals. By hijacking control of a popular media or business account, attackers can distribute their malicious messages or disseminate fake information…
Facebook News Feed personalization algorithm has a significant impact, on a daily basis, on the lifestyle, mood and opinion of millions of Internet users. Nonetheless, the behavior of such algorithms usually lacks transparency, motivating…
Many adult content websites incorporate social networking features. Although these are popular, they raise significant challenges, including the potential for users to "catfish", i.e., to create fake profiles to deceive other users. This…
Interest in unethical user interfaces has grown in HCI over recent years, with researchers identifying malicious design strategies referred to as ''dark patterns''. While such strategies have been described in numerous domains, we lack a…
We analyse the darkweb and find its structure is unusual. For example, $ \sim 87 \%$ of darkweb sites \emph{never} link to another site. To call the darkweb a "web" is thus a misnomer -- it's better described as a set of largely isolated…
We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network…
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…
A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016…
Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Such dynamics might affect page popularity. In this paper we introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the…
We propose new privacy attacks to infer attributes (e.g., locations, occupations, and interests) of online social network users. Our attacks leverage seemingly innocent user information that is publicly available in online social networks…