Estimating age privacy leakage in online social networks

—It is well known that Online Social Networks (OSNs) are vulnerable to privacy leakages, whereby specific information about a user (political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender and so on) can sometimes be determined by a third party although the user does not intend to make the information available to the general public. Typically third parties ascertain private information by aggregating information provided by the online friends of the user. In this paper, we perform a large-scale study to quantify just how severe the privacy leakage problem is in Facebook. As a case study, we focus on estimating birth year, which is a fundamental human attribute and, for many people, a private one. Specifically, we attempt to estimate the birth year of over 1 million Facebook users in New York City. We examine the accuracy of estimation procedures for several classes of users: (i) highly private users, who do not make their friend lists public; (ii) users who hide their birth years but ma...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Ratan Dey, Cong Tang, Keith W. Ross, Nitesh Saxena
• Keywords: Communications, Estimation Procedures, INFOCOM 2012, Iterative Algorithm, Online Social Networks