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No Place to Hide: Inadvertent Location Privacy Leaks on Twitter
Journal article   Peer reviewed

No Place to Hide: Inadvertent Location Privacy Leaks on Twitter

Jonathan Rusert, Osama Khalid, Dat Hong, Zubair Shafiq and Padmini Srinivasan
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Vol.2019(4), pp.172-189
10/01/2019
DOI: 10.2478/popets-2019-0064

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Abstract

There is a natural tension between the desire to share information and keep sensitive information private on online social media. Privacy seeking social media users may seek to keep their location private by avoiding the mentions of location revealing words such as points of interest (POIs), believing this to be enough. In this paper, we show that it is possible to uncover the location of a social media user’s post even when it is not geotagged and does not contain any POI information. Our proposed approach J achieves this by exploiting the shared vocabulary between users who reveal their location and those who do not. To this end, J uses a variant of the Naive Bayes algorithm to identify location revealing words or hashtags based on both temporal and atemporal perspectives. Our evaluation using tweets collected from four different states in the United States shows that J can accurately infer the locations of close to half a million tweets corresponding to more than 20,000 distinct users (i.e., more than 50% of the test users) from the four states. Our work demonstrates that location privacy leaks do occur despite due precautions by a privacy conscious user. We design and evaluate countermeasures based J to mitigate location privacy leaks.

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