Monday Research Seminar Series
January 28, Alessandro Acquisti
Noon, Hamburg Hall, Room 1502
Re-identifying Social Security Numbers from Online Social Networks Data
I will present results from a study of privacy risks associated with information sharing in online social networks. Online social networks such as Friendster, MySpace, or the Facebook have experienced exponential growth in membership in recent years. They are no longer niche phenomena: millions use them for communicating, networking, or dating. These networks are successful examples of computer-mediated social interaction. However, they also raise novel privacy concerns, which this research aims at quantifying.
Specifically, I evaluate the risks that information publicly provided on a social networking site may be used to gather additional and potentially more sensitive data about an individual, exploiting the online profile as a 'breeding' document. I will focus on whether knowledge of an individual's personal information (PI) can lead to the estimation of sensitive personal
identifying information (PII), such as that individual's social security number.
