Matching User Profiles Across Social Networks

  • Nacéra Bennacer
  • Coriane Nana Jipmo
  • Antonio Penta
  • Gianluca Quercini
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 8484)

Abstract

Social Networking Sites, such as Facebook and Linkedin, are clear examples of the impact that the Web 2.0 has on people around the world, because they target an aspect of life that is extremely important to anyone: social relationships. The key to building a social network is the ability of finding people that we know in real life, which, in turn, requires those people to make publicly available some personal information, such as their names, family names, locations and birth dates, just to name a few. However, it is not uncommon that individuals create multiple profiles in several social networks, each containing partially overlapping sets of personal information. Matching those different profiles allows to create a global profile that gives a holistic view of the information of an individual. In this paper, we present an algorithm that uses the network topology and the publicly available personal information to iteratively match profiles across n social networks, based on those individuals who disclose the links to their multiple profiles. The evaluation results, obtained on a real dataset composed of around 2 million profiles, show that our algorithm achieves a high accuracy.

Keywords

Social Network Personal Information Social Networking Site Transitive Closure Online Social Network 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. 1.
    Gross, R., Acquisti, A.: Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, WPES 2005, pp. 71–80. ACM, New York (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. 2.
    Little, L., Briggs, P., Coventry, L.: Who Knows about Me?: An Analysis of Age-related Disclosure Preferences. In: Proceedings of the 25th BCS Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, BCS-HCI 2011, pp. 84–87. British Computer Society, Swinton (2011)Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Stutzman, F.: An Evaluation of Identity-Sharing Behavior in Social Network Communities. iDMAa Journal 3(1) (2006)Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Perito, D., Castelluccia, C., Kaafar, M.A., Manils, P.: How Unique and Traceable Are Usernames? In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Hopper, N. (eds.) PETS 2011. LNCS, vol. 6794, pp. 1–17. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. 5.
    Zafarani, R., Liu, H.: Connecting Corresponding Identities across Communities. In: Third International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2009)Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Carmagnola, F., Cena, F.: User Identification for Cross-system Personalisation. Inf. Sci. 179, 16–32 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. 7.
    Cortis, K., Scerri, S., Rivera, I., Handschuh, S.: Discovering Semantic Equivalence of People Behind Online Profiles. In: Proceedings of the Resource Discovery (RED) Workshop. ESWC (2012)Google Scholar
  8. 8.
    Golbeck, J., Rothstein, M.: Linking Social Networks on the Web with FOAF: A Semantic Web Case Study. In: AAAI, vol. 8, pp. 1138–1143 (2008)Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Malhotra, A., Totti, L., Meira, W., Kumaraguru, P., Almeida, V.: Studying User Footprints in Different Online Social Networks. In: International Workshop on Cybersecurity of Online Social Network, ACM ASONAM 2012 (2012)Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Motoyama, M., Varghese, G.: I Seek You: Searching and Matching Individuals in Social Networks. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management, pp. 67–75. ACM (2009)Google Scholar
  11. 11.
    Raad, E., Chbeir, R., Dipanda, A.: User Profile Matching in Social Networks. In: 2010 13th International Conference on Network-Based Information Systems (NBiS), pp. 297–304. IEEE (2010)Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    Rowe, M.: Interlinking Distributed Social Graphs. In: Linked Data on the Web Workshop, WWW (2009)Google Scholar
  13. 13.
    Bartunov, S., Korshunov, A., Park, S., Ryu, W., Lee, H.: Joint Link-attribute User Identity Resolution in Online Social Networks. In: SNA-KDD Workshop (2012)Google Scholar
  14. 14.
    Buccafurri, F., Lax, G., Nocera, A., Ursino, D.: Discovering Links among Social Networks. In: Flach, P.A., De Bie, T., Cristianini, N. (eds.) ECML PKDD 2012, Part II. LNCS, vol. 7524, pp. 467–482. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 15.
    Jain, P., Kumaraguru, P., Joshi, A.: @i Seek ’fb.me’: Identifying Users Across Multiple Online Social Networks. In: WWW (Companion Volume), pp. 1259–1268 (2013)Google Scholar
  16. 16.
    Narayanan, A., Shmatikov, V.: De-anonymizing Social Networks. In: 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 173–187. IEEE (2009)Google Scholar
  17. 17.
  18. 18.
  19. 19.
  20. 20.
    Krishnamurthy, B., Wills, C.E.: On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information via Online Social Networks. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks, pp. 7–12. ACM (2009)Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Nacéra Bennacer
    • 1
  • Coriane Nana Jipmo
    • 1
  • Antonio Penta
    • 2
  • Gianluca Quercini
    • 1
  1. 1.Supélec E3SGif-sur-YvetteFrance
  2. 2.Università di TorinoTorinoItaly

Personalised recommendations