Twitter and privacy: 1-in-5 tweets divulge user location

USC researcher creates app that lets you test your own location footprint

2013-09-04

(Press-News.org) Hashtag #doyouknowwhoswatchingyou? A new study from USC researchers sampled more than 15 million tweets, showing that some Twitter users may be inadvertently revealing their location through updates on the social media channel.

The study, which appears in the current issue of the International Journal of Geoinformatics, provides important factual data for a growing national conversation about online privacy and third-party commercial or government use of geo-tagged information.

"I'm a pretty private person, and I wish others would be more cautious with the types of information they share," said lead author Chris Weidemann, a graduate student in the Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) online master's program at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "There are all sorts of information that can be gleaned from things outside of the tweet itself."

Twitter has approximately 500 million active users, who are expected to tweet 72 billion times in 2013. Reports have shown that about 6 percent of users opt-in to allow the platform to broadcast their location with every tweet.

But that's only part of the footprint Twitter users leave, and even users who have not opted-in for location tagging may be inadvertently revealing where they are, the study shows.

To get a fuller sense of what publicly accessible data might reveal about Twitter users, Weidemann developed an application called Twitter2GIS, to analyze the metadata collected by Twitter, including details about the user's hometown, time zone and language.

The data, generated by Twitter users and available through Twitter's application programming interface (API) and Google's Geocoding API, was then processed by a software program, which mapped and analyzed the data, searching for trends.

During the one-week sampling period of the study, roughly 20 percent of the tweets collected showed the user's location to an accuracy of street level or better.

Many Twitter users divulged their physical location directly through active location monitoring or GPS coordinates. But another 2.2 percent of all tweets – equating to about 4.4 million tweets a day – provided so-called "ambient" location data, where the user might not be aware that they are divulging their location.

"The downside is that mining this kind of information can also provide opportunities for criminal misuse of data," Weidemann said. "My intent is to educate social media users and inform the public about their privacy."

In addition to being a graduate student at USC, Weidemann works for a company that builds geographic information systems for the federal government. He initially developed Twitter2GIS as part of a capstone project for a course taught by Jennifer Swift, associate teaching professor of spatial sciences at USC.

Swift, Weidemann's thesis adviser, said the project stood out for its thoughtful look at geospatial information: "It will help create an awareness among the general population about the information they divulge," said Swift, a co-author on the study.

Weidemann is a self-described "conservative" Twitter user, using the social media channel infrequently. He has the privacy set to not share any location information about his tweets. Still, in the course of doing this study, he turned Twitter2GIS on his own account and was surprised at the specificity the application was able to find about his location, based on a hashtag he used about an academic conference.

"This research has been fun," Weidemann said. "And a little scary."

INFORMATION:

Weidemann is opening up Twitter2GIS to the public, expanding it to allow Twitter users to login in with their profile credentials so they can view their own location footprint. Test out the beta version and provide feedback at http://geosocialfootprint.com.

For more information about the study or to arrange an interview with a researcher, contact Michelle Boston at msalzman@dornsife.usc.edu. Weidemann is enrolled in an online master's program at USC and is not based in Los Angeles.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Researchers discover breakthrough technique that could make electronics smaller and better

2013-09-04

An international group of researchers from the University of Minnesota, Argonne National Laboratory and Seoul National University have discovered a groundbreaking technique in manufacturing nanostructures that has the potential to make electrical and optical devices smaller and better than ever before. A surprising low-tech tool of Scotch Magic tape ended up being one of the keys to the discovery. The research is published today in Nature Communications, an international online research journal. Combining several standard nanofabrication techniques—with the final addition ...

Clay key to high-temperature supercapacitors

2013-09-04

HOUSTON – (Sept. 3, 2013) – Clay, an abundant and cheap natural material, is a key ingredient in a supercapacitor that can operate at very high temperatures, according to Rice University researchers who have developed such a device. The Rice group of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan reported today in Nature's online journal, Scientific Reports that the supercapacitor is reliable at temperatures of up to 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit) and possibly beyond. It could be useful for powering devices for use in extreme environments, such as oil drilling, the ...

Massive storm pulls water and ammonia ices from Saturn's depths

2013-09-04

MADISON, Wis. — Once every 30 years or so, or roughly one Saturnian year, a monster storm rips across the northern hemisphere of the ringed planet. In 2010, the most recent and only the sixth giant storm on Saturn observed by humans began stirring. It quickly grew to superstorm proportions, reaching 15,000 kilometers (more than 9,300 miles) in width and visible to amateur astronomers on Earth as a great white spot dancing across the surface of the planet. Now, thanks to near-infrared spectral measurements taken by NASA's Cassini orbiter and analysis of near-infrared ...

Tattoos reduce chances of getting a job, new research says

2013-09-04

London (Wednesday 04 September 2013). Having a tattoo can reduce your chance of getting a job, but it depends on where the tattoo is, what it depicts and if the job involves dealing with customers, new research says. Dr Andrew R. Timming told the British Sociological Association conference on work, employment and society in Warwick today [Wednesday 4 September] that employers were prone to view tattoos negatively. Dr Timming, of the School of Management at the University of St Andrews, said he had spoken to 15 managers involved in hiring staff about their reaction to ...

Degree is no protection against under-employment, research shows

2013-09-04

London (Wednesday 04 September 2013). Having a degree or other qualifications is no protection against under-employment in Britain, new research shows. The British Sociological Association's conference on work, employment and society in Warwick heard today [Wednesday 4 September] that qualified women were more likely to be under-employed than unqualified ones. Qualified men were just as likely to be under-employed as unqualified ones. Dr Surhan Cam, of School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, said that as working hours were cut during the economic slowdown, ...

Using harsh verbal discipline with teens found to be harmful

2013-09-04

Many American parents yell or shout at their teenagers. A new longitudinal study has found that using such harsh verbal discipline in early adolescence can be harmful to teens later. Instead of minimizing teens' problematic behavior, harsh verbal discipline may actually aggravate it. The study, from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan, appears in the journal Child Development. Harsh verbal discipline happens when parents use psychological force to cause a child to experience emotional pain or discomfort in an effort to correct ...

Health landscape in 6 global regions reveals rapid progress and daunting challenges

2013-09-04

WASHINGTON, September 4, 2013 — In the Middle East and North Africa, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes are causing a massive amount of premature death and disability. People in Latin America and the Caribbean are living longer on the whole, yet they face increasing threats from chronic diseases. Mortality has declined in many South Asian countries, yet the number of deaths by non-communicable diseases and self-harm has skyrocketed since 1990. These are some of the findings released by the World Bank Group and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in ...

New method for early detection of colon cancer

2013-09-04

PHILADELPHIA — A new, highly sensitive method to detect genetic variations that initiate colon cancer could be readily used for noninvasive colon cancer screening, according to a study published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Tumor cells are released into stool from the surface of precancers and early-stage colon cancers, but detecting a cancer-initiating genetic mutation among a large quantity of normal DNA from a patient's stool is like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Bettina Scholtka, Ph.D., assistant ...

NUS study highlights effectiveness of community-based cardiac rehabilitation

2013-09-03

With a growing incidence of cardiovascular disease in Asia, lifestyle modification such as weight loss and routine exercise plays an important role in early primary cardiovascular disease prevention. While it is widely known that patients with cardiovascular conditions will benefit from participating in a structured cardiac rehabilitation programme, particularly in a convenient and affordable community-based setting, there is no published data that showed the effectiveness of such a programme in the Asian population to date. With the idea of health promotion in mind, ...

Evidence of production of luxury textiles and extraction of copper from unknown part of Cypriote Bronze Age city

2013-09-03

A Swedish archaeological expedition from the University of Gothenburg has excavated a previously unknown part of the Bronze Age city Hala Sultan Tekke (around 1600-1100 BC). The finds include a facility for extraction of copper and production of bronze objects, evidence of production of luxurious textiles, as well as ceramics and other objects imported from all over the Mediterranean but also from central Europe. 'One of our conclusions is that the Bronze Age culture in Hala Sultan Tekke played a central role in the Eastern Mediterranean. Cyprus served as an important ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Development of a novel modified selective medium cefixime–tellurite-phosphate-xylose-rhamnose MacConkey agar for isolation of Escherichia albertii and its evaluation with food samples

KIST develops full-color-emitting upconversion nanoparticle technology for color displays with ultra-high color reproducibility

Crystal L. Mackall, MD, FAACR, recognized with the 2025 AACR-Cancer Research Institute Lloyd J. Old Award in Cancer Immunology

A novel strategy for detecting trace-level nanoplastics in aquatic environments: Multi-feature machine learning-enhanced SERS quantification leveraging the coffee ring effect