On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks

By Balachander Krishnamurthy, Craig E. Wills. CCRV, 2009

403 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For purposes of this paper, we define "Personally identifiable information" (PII) as information which can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity either alone or when combined with other information that is linkable to a specific individual. The popularity of Online Social Networks (OSN) has accelerated the appearance of vast amounts of personal information on the Internet. Our research shows that it is possible for third-parties to link PII, which is leaked via OSNs, with user actions both within OSN sites and elsewhere on non-OSN sites. We refer to this ability to link PII and combine it with other information as "leakage". We have identified multiple ways by which such leakage occurs and discuss measures to prevent it.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/166b1eb0f041a9b19e4411ee4d3c5bad6662a6bf

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Citations in the corpus

Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook (2013, background): “Krishnamurthy and Wills found in 2009 that some thirdparty apps were leaking users’ unique identifiers for sharing with third-party aggregators and advertising partners [36].”
Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology (2012, background): “[10], [11], [12], [13]), manually inspect browser state (e.”
Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis (2016, background): “We consider a threat model where a surveillance agency has identified a target by a third-party cookie (for example, via leakage of identifiers by first parties, as described in [12, 22, 24]).”
Protecting privacy when mining and sharing user data (2012, background): “5 Related Work The work most closely related to ours is that of Wills and Krishnamurthy [114] and Edelman [53] who have shown that clicking on a Facebook ad, in some cases, revealed to the advertiser the user ID of the person clicking, due to Facebook’s failure to properly anonymize the HTTP Referer”
Privacy Violations Using Microtargeted Ads: A Case Study (2010, background): “The work most closely related to ours is that of Wills and Krishnamurthy [25] and Edelman [11] who have shown that clicking on a Facebook ad, in some cases, revealed to the advertiser the user ID of the person clicking, due to Facebook’s failure to properly anonymize the HTTP Referer header.”
Towards a Visual Privacy Advisor: Understanding and Predicting Privacy Risks in Images (2017, neutral): “[24, 22] uncover privacy leakage when websites accidentally provide user information embedded in HTTP requests when contacting third-party aggregators.”
Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web (2012, background): “In [13] and [16], the authors examine the direct leakage of private data from first-party websites to data aggregators, including the potential linkage of user accounts on separate sites.”