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  4. Tagvisor: A Privacy Advisor for Sharing Hashtags
 
conference paper

Tagvisor: A Privacy Advisor for Sharing Hashtags

Zhang, Yang
•
Humbert, Mathias  
•
Rahman, Tahleen
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January 1, 2018
Web Conference 2018: Proceedings Of The World Wide Web Conference (Www2018)
27th World Wide Web (WWW) Conference

Hashtag has emerged as a widely used concept of popular culture and campaigns, but its implications on people's privacy have not been investigated so far. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of privacy issues induced by hashtags. We concentrate in particular on location, which is recognized as one of the key privacy concerns in the Internet era. By relying on a random forest model, we show that we can infer a user's precise location from hashtags with accuracy of 70% to 76%, depending on the city. To remedy this situation, we introduce a system called Tagvisor that systematically suggests alternative hashtags if the user-selected ones constitute a threat to location privacy. Tagvisor realizes this by means of three conceptually different obfuscation techniques and a semantics-based metric for measuring the consequent utility loss. Our findings show that obfuscating as little as two hashtags already provides a near-optimal trade-off between privacy and utility in our dataset. This in particular renders Tagvisor highly time-efficient, and thus, practical in real-world settings.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3178876.3186095
Web of Science ID

WOS:000460379000028

Author(s)
Zhang, Yang
Humbert, Mathias  
Rahman, Tahleen
Li, Cheng-Te
Pang, Jun
Backes, Michael
Date Issued

2018-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Publisher place

New York

Published in
Web Conference 2018: Proceedings Of The World Wide Web Conference (Www2018)
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-5639-8

Start page

287

End page

296

Subjects

Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications

•

Computer Science, Theory & Methods

•

Computer Science

•

hashtag

•

location privacy

•

online social networks

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LDS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
27th World Wide Web (WWW) Conference

Lyon, FRANCE

Apr 23-27, 2018

Available on Infoscience
June 18, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/157816
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