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Personally identifiable information leakage through online social networks

Published: 07 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Information sharing on the Internet has become a streamlined process through services such as e-mail, blogs and recently also Online Social Networks (OSNs). The speed of posting information in one central place and the convenience of this information reaching a vast audience at the same time is a great advantage of this style of communication, but at the same time also a danger. The aim of this article is thus to introduce a prototype software model that can analyse not only the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that users share on OSNs, but with whom they share this. Such analysis will give users a good indication of how their private information is shared based on different settings within their OSN profiles. To successfully develop such a model, familiarity with the concepts of information sharing and PII is firstly investigated. Identifying information leakage within one of the most popular OSNs follows. In combination with our programming knowledge, a prototype model is introduced and an overview of preliminary results is given. Due to the generic nature of the model, we are able to visually introduce and explain the process of information deduction -- an aspect of information sharing often overlooked due to its invisible nature. After analysing the information gathered from our model, we conclude that the immense popularity of Facebook on both a global and local scale contribute to its success, but at the same time make its users more prone to leak information and subsequently be the potential targets of cyber criminals. The ease, anonymity and borderless nature of the Internet in combination with the poor default security settings of our investigated OSN all contribute to the lucrative industry of cyber crime. Proper user awareness is crucial to preventing the leaking of any information in an online environment, but for many users this still equates to (a) PII in the sky.

References

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Nguyen, D. T., Shen, Y., Syu, Y., Thai, M. T. 2012. Maximizing circle of trust in online social networks. Proceeding of the 23rd ACM conference on Hypertext and social media. ACM Press, New York, NY, 155--164. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2309996.2310023
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StatCounter Global Stats, Top 7 Social Media Sites on June 2013. Retrieved June 1, 2013, from: http://gs.statcounter.com/#social_media-ww-monthly-201306-201306-bar
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StatCounter Global Stats, Top 7 Social Media Sites in South Africa on June 2013. Retrieved June 1, 2013, from: http://gs.statcounter.com/#social_media-ZA-monthly-201306-201306-bar
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Malin, B. 2005. Betrayed by my shadow: learning data identity via trail matching. Journal of Privacy Techn., 2005.
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Kirshnamurthy, B. and Wills, C. E. 2009. On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information via Online Social Networks. WOSN'09, August 17, 2009, Barcelona, Spain.
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Ahmad, A., Chang, S. and Molok, N. N. A. 2010. Information Leaking through Online Social Networking: Opening the Doorway for Advances Persistence Threats. Conference proceeding of the 8th Australian Information Security Management Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia, 30 November 2010.
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Cited By

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  • (2023)A Survey Study of Social Media User Awareness Towards Personal Identifiable Information's Data Security in Indonesian Millennial Generation2023 3rd International Conference on Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Intelligent System (ICE3IS)10.1109/ICE3IS59323.2023.10335434(133-137)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
  • (2022)User concerns regarding information sharing on social networking sites: The user’s perspective in the context of national culturePLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.026315717:1(e0263157)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2022
  • (2017)An Integrated Risk Management FrameworkDecision Management10.4018/978-1-5225-1837-2.ch022(470-486)Online publication date: 2017
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SAICSIT '13: Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference
October 2013
398 pages
ISBN:9781450321129
DOI:10.1145/2513456
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • Amazon: Amazon.com
  • Rhodes Univ.: Rhodes University
  • IBM: IBM

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 October 2013

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Author Tags

  1. cyber security
  2. information access rights
  3. online social networks
  4. personally identifiable information
  5. social engineering

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SAICSIT '13
Sponsor:
  • Amazon
  • Rhodes Univ.
  • IBM

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SAICSIT '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 89 submissions, 54%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)A Survey Study of Social Media User Awareness Towards Personal Identifiable Information's Data Security in Indonesian Millennial Generation2023 3rd International Conference on Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Intelligent System (ICE3IS)10.1109/ICE3IS59323.2023.10335434(133-137)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
  • (2022)User concerns regarding information sharing on social networking sites: The user’s perspective in the context of national culturePLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.026315717:1(e0263157)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2022
  • (2017)An Integrated Risk Management FrameworkDecision Management10.4018/978-1-5225-1837-2.ch022(470-486)Online publication date: 2017
  • (2017)Tools for Achieving Usable Ex Post Transparency: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2017.27655395(22965-22991)Online publication date: 2017
  • (2014)An Integrated Risk Management FrameworkInternational Journal of Knowledge Management10.4018/ijkm.201404010310:2(28-42)Online publication date: Apr-2014
  • (2014)Online social networks to online social malworks — The evolution of an industry2014 IST-Africa Conference Proceedings10.1109/ISTAFRICA.2014.6880611(1-7)Online publication date: May-2014

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