Your Love is Public Now: Questioning the Use of Personal Information in Authentication

• Main Authors: GUPTA, Payas, GOTTIPATI, Swapna, JIANG, Jing, GAO, Debin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: social media; networking platforms; user public data; privacy; profile page information; Facebook; user real interests; inference of real interests; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1703; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2702/viewcontent/asiaccs13.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a Facebook page to determine the user's real interests. Our experiments conducted on over 34,000 public pages collected from Facebook and data from volunteers show that our inference technique can infer interests that are often hidden by users on their personal profile with moderate accuracy. We are able to disclose 22 interests of a user and find more than 80,097 users with at least 2 interests. We also show how this inferred information can be used to break a preference based backup authentication system.