An online wake-up call today – hiding behind anonymous social media profiles apparently doesn’t work.
A new report shows how data scientists used location tags to sniff out accounts belonging to the same people.
On the plus side, it means vitriolic Twitter trolls who post incognito could be busted by the new search technique.
But it has privacy implications too – as metadata could end up linking more private services like Tinder to your work profiles.
Researchers from Columbia University and Google published this report explaining their technique.
It showed how they used Twitter, Instagram and FourSquare as test networks, scraping data and wringing it through an algorithm to work out who was doing double duty.
The data was so distinctive that even just a couple of location points from different services let them pin down who was who.
Many apps have location sharing features on by default, meaning users might not realize how much they’re giving away.
Turning location features off may help, but other metadata also makes a trail that gives users away.
As devices proliferate and find new types of data to collect and share, the problem is only likely to get worse.