Abstract
Numerous social media platforms expose their user’s location data to the public. This study was conducted to show how easily this data can be collected and visualized. Using basic a basic PC, trilateration and a database, 104 million data points from over 23 thousand unique users were collected over the course of nine days. Visualization with the help of Leaflet showed that the daily commute of randomly selected users was easily visualized and critical information like his or her home address, habits and work place could get extracted. Website operators need to implement measures to mitigate lateration attacks. Otherwise, their user’s privacy can be violated by everyone with basic scripting skills.
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Bäsler, M., Bäsler, M. (2021). Abusive Use of Distance Indicators on Dating Platforms Through Trilateration. In: Krieger, U.R., Eichler, G., Erfurth, C., Fahrnberger, G. (eds) Innovations for Community Services. I4CS 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1404. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75004-6_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75004-6_11
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