Sunday, December 20, 2009

Online Social Networks "Leak" Personal Information to Third-Party Tracking Sites, New Study Shows

Leakage Puts Social Network Users at Risk of Having Their Identity Linked With Their Browsing Behavior When you assurance up with a amusing networking site, you are assigned a different identifier users put a lot of advice about themselves on amusing networking sites. Second, a lot of that advice can be apparent by added users, by default. There are mechanisms users can use to absolute acceptance to their information, but we begin through antecedent analysis that a lot of users don't crop advantage of them. Tracking sites don't accept the adeptness to apperceive if, for example, a website about blight was visited out of curiosity, or because the user in actuality has cancer. Profiling is awkward on its own, but inaccurate profiling could potentially advance to issues with employment, bloom affliction coverage, or added areas of our claimed lives. We are not adage that they are necessarily aggravating to aperture clandestine information But already anyone is in control of your different identifier, there is so abundant they can apprentice about you. And even if tracking sites do not use the advice themselves, can they agreement that it will never acquisition its way into added hands? For these reasons, we feel this affair is something that we should to be anxious about.

Worcester, MA (Vocus/PRWEB ) August 25, 2009 -- More than a bisected billion humans use online amusing networks, announcement all-inclusive amounts of advice about themselves to allotment with online accompany and colleagues. A new abstraction co-authored by a researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has begin that the practices of abounding accepted amusing networking sites about accomplish that claimed advice accessible to companies that clue Web users' browsing habits and acquiesce them to hotlink bearding browsing habits to specific people. The study, presented afresh in Barcelona at the Workshop on Online Social Networks, allotment of the anniversary appointment of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, is the aboriginal to call a apparatus that tracking sites could use to anon hotlink browsing habits to specific individuals.

"When you assurance up with a amusing networking site, you are assigned a different identifier," says Craig Wills, assistant of computer science at WPI, who conducted the abstraction with an industry colleague. "This is a cord of numbers or characters that credibility to your profile. We begin that if amusing networking sites canyon advice to tracking sites about your activities, they generally cover this different identifier. So now a tracking website not alone has a contour of your Web browsing activities, it can hotlink that contour to the claimed advice you column on the amusing networking site. Now your browsing contour is not just of somebody, it is of you."

Like a lot of bartering websites, online amusing networks use third-party tracking sites, alleged aggregators, to apprentice about the browsing habits of their visitors. Cookies are maintained by a Web browser and accommodate advice that accredit tracking sites to body profiles of the websites visited by a user. Each time the user visits a new website, the tracking website can analysis those accolade and serve up ads that ability address to the user. For example, if the user frequently visits aliment sites, he or she ability see an ad for a new cookbook.
   
Online networking sites accept gone a footfall added by acceptance for manual of different identifiers. It is a decidedly adverse convenance for two reasons, Wills says. "First," he notes. "users put a lot of advice about themselves on amusing networking sites. Second, a lot of that advice can be apparent by added users, by default. There are mechanisms users can use to absolute acceptance to their information, but we begin through antecedent analysis that a lot of users don't crop advantage of them." With a different identifier, a tracking website could accretion acceptance to a user's name, concrete address, email address, gender, bearing date, educational and application information, and abundant more.

With the "leakage" of this blazon claimed information, there is a cogent accident of accepting one's character affiliated to an inaccurate or ambiguous browsing profile. Browsing profiles almanac the websites a accurate computer has accessed, not who was application the computer at the time or why accurate sites were chosen. According to Wills, this leaves allowance for inaccurate profiling by tracking sites, a bearings that has the abeyant to advance to austere problems. When a computer is acclimated by added than one person, or a being browses for concern rather than intent, it leaves allowance for misinterpretation, he notes. "Tracking sites don't accept the adeptness to apperceive if, for example, a website about blight was visited out of curiosity, or because the user in actuality has cancer. Profiling is awkward on its own, but inaccurate profiling could potentially advance to issues with employment, bloom affliction coverage, or added areas of our claimed lives."
   
Wills says the advisers do not apperceive what, if anything, tracking sites do with the different identifiers that amusing networks address to them. They say they accept announced with all of the sites they advised to acquaint them about the aloofness leakage, but accept not heard aback clearly from any. "We are not adage that they are necessarily aggravating to aperture clandestine information," he says. "But already anyone is in control of your different identifier, there is so abundant they can apprentice about you. And even if tracking sites do not use the advice themselves, can they agreement that it will never acquisition its way into added hands? For these reasons, we feel this affair is something that we should to be anxious about."

The advisers aswell agenda that while users of amusing networking sites can assure themselves to some amount by attached the aggregate of advice they column and application the protections the sites accomplish accessible to them to absolute acceptance to their information, the easiest way to anticipate aloofness arising would be for amusing networking sites to stop authoritative different identifiers visible.

View the abounding abstraction here:
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2009/workshops/wosn/papers/p7.pdf

About Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Founded in 1865 in Worcester, Mass., WPI was one of the nation's aboriginal engineering and technology universities. WPI's14 bookish departments action added than 50 undergraduate and alum amount programs in science, engineering, technology, management, the amusing sciences, and the abstract and arts, arch to bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees. WPI's world-class adroitness plan with acceptance in a amount of cutting-edge analysis areas, arch to breakthroughs and innovations in such fields as biotechnology, ammunition cells, and advice security, abstracts processing, and nanotechnology. Students aswell accept the befalling to accomplish a aberration to communities and organizations about the apple through the university's avant-garde Global Perspective Program. There are 25 WPI activity centers throughout North America and Central America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Europe.

Contact:
Michael Dorsey, Director of Research Communications
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, Massachusetts
508-831-5609

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