While I have never made any great attempt to conceal my real identity here, posting as I do, psudononymously rather than anonymously, I do still value my privacy. I do not, for example, expose my real address, telephone number or email address here and intend to keep it that way. Others, it seems, are rather more careless with such information when they join social networking sites. I have never felt inclined to join a social networking site such as Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. Indeed, when asked recently to join Linked-In, I declined. Blogging on a platform such as this gives me absolute control over what I share. This is not so with social networking sites and, it appears, any attempts to anonymise are easily undone.
By analysing links between users of social sites, researchers were able to identify many people in supposedly anonymous data sets.
The anonymised data is produced by social sites who sell it to marketing firms to generate cash.
The results suggest web firms should do more to protect users’ privacy, said the researchers.
Firstly, I do not want my data sold off to marketing firms. That alone is a good enough reason for me to steer clear. That an algorithm can de-anonymise the data set is disturbing.
Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Dr Vitaly Shmatikov, from the University of Texas at Austin, developed the algorithm which turned the anonymous data back into names and addresses.
The data sets are usually stripped of personally identifiable information, such as names, before it is sold to marketing companies or researchers keen to plumb it for useful information.
Before now, it was thought sufficient to remove this data to make sure that the true identities of subjects could not be reconstructed.
The algorithm developed by the pair looks at relationships between all the members of a social network – not just the immediate friends that members of these sites connect to.
Social graphs from Twitter, Flickr and Live Journal were used in the research.
The pair found that one third of those who are on both Flickr and Twitter can be identified from the completely anonymous Twitter graph. This is despite the fact that the overlap of members between the two services is thought to be about 15%.
That, frankly, is a damned good reason not to have any dealings with Twitter, Flickr or Live Journal, either.
I do use Flickr. This development worries me.