Cybercasing The Joint: On The Privacy Implications Of Internet Posts

Gerald Friedland, International Computer Science Institute

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

This talk aims to raise awareness for a rapidly emerging privacy threat that we termed "cybercasing": leveraging information available online to mount real-world attacks. Based on the initial example of geo-tagging, I will show that while users typically realize that sharing information, e.g., on social networks, has some implications for their privacy, many users 1) are unaware of the full scope of the threat they face when doing so, and 2) often do not even realize when they publish such information. The threat is elevated by recent developments that make systematic search for information (either posted by humans or by sensors) and inference from multiple sources easier than ever before. This talk presents a set of scenarios demonstrating how easy it is to correlate data, especially those based on location information, with corresponding publicly available information for compromising a victim's privacy.