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| Identifier |
000419284 |
| Title |
Exploring the privacy implications of location (meta)data in public data streams |
| Alternative Title |
Διερεύνηση των επιπτώσεων στην ιδιωτικότητα από δεδομένα γεωγραφικής τοποθεσίας σε δημόσιες ροές δεδομένων |
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Author
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Δρακωνάκης, Κωνσταντίνος Ι.
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Thesis advisor
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Μαρκάτος, Ευάγγελος
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Reviewer
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Ιωαννίδης, Σωτήρης
Φατούρου, Παναγιώτα
Polakis, Jason
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| Abstract |
The exposure of location data constitutes a significant privacy risk to users
as it can lead to de-anonymization, the inference of sensitive information, and
even physical threats. In this work we present LPAuditor, a tool that conducts
a comprehensive evaluation of the privacy loss caused by publicly available location metadata.
First, we demonstrate how our system can pinpoint users’ key
locations at an unprecedented granularity by identifying their actual postal addresses. Our
experimental evaluation on Twitter data highlights the effectiveness
of our techniques which outperform prior approaches by 18.9%-91.6% for homes
and 8.7%-21.8% for workplaces. Next we present a novel exploration of automated
private information inference that uncovers “sensitive” locations that users have
visited (pertaining to health, religion, and sex/nightlife). We find that location
metadata can provide additional context to tweets and thus lead to the exposure
of private information that might not match the users’ intentions.
We further explore the mismatch between user actions and information exposure and find that
older versions of the official Twitter apps follow a privacy-invasive
policy of including precise GPS coordinates in the metadata of tweets that users
have geotagged at a coarse-grained level (e.g., city). The implications of this exposure are further
exacerbated by our finding that users are considerably privacy
cautious in regards to exposing precise location data. When users can explicitly
select what location data is published, there is a 94.6% reduction in tweets with
GPS coordinates. As part of current efforts to give users more control over their
data, LPAuditor can be adopted by major services and offered as an auditing tool
that informs users about sensitive information they (indirectly) expose through
location metadata
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| Language |
English |
| Subject |
Location metadata |
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Μεταδεδομένα τοποθεσίας |
| Issue date |
2018-11-23 |
| Collection
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School/Department--School of Sciences and Engineering--Department of Computer Science--Post-graduate theses
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Type of Work--Post-graduate theses
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| Views |
437 |
Exploring the privacy implications of location (meta)data in public data streams
