Carson L. Nemelka
Minhui Xue
Keith W. Ross
ABSTRACT
The recent growth of anonymous messaging services -- such as 4chan, Whisper, and Yik Yak -- has brought online anonymity into the spotlight. Ideally, anonymous posts in principle allow for fully open discussion, and facilitate the sharing of controversial ideas.
In this research, we attempt to exploit the location-based feature of Yik Yak to determine the location from which a yak is posted. We conducted our experiment across Missoula, home of the University of Montana by using six computers to probe from the 2,880 locations and record the yaks seen. Our preliminary results show that Yik Yak, and location-based services like it, potentially have a major privacy flaw. By knowing the general vicinity of the yak, other side information -- such as the content of the yak along with the locations of college dorms, off-campus residences and local coffee shops -- may allow one to further narrow down where the yak is coming from. A more in-depth experiment and analysis, possibly using a denser honeycomb and machine learning, may be able to predict yak locations with much greater accuracy.
Index Terms
- You Can Yak But You Can't Hide
Recommendations
You Can Yak but You Can't Hide: Localizing Anonymous Social Network Users
IMC '16: Proceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement ConferenceThe recent growth of anonymous social network services -- such as 4chan, Whisper, and Yik Yak -- has brought online anonymity into the spotlight. For these services to function properly, the integrity of user anonymity must be preserved. If an attacker ...
Location privacy protection with a semi-honest anonymizer in information centric networking
ICN '18: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Information-Centric NetworkingLocation-based services, which provide services based on locations of consumers' interests, are becoming essential for our daily lives. Since the location of a consumer's interest contains private information, several studies propose location privacy ...
Anonymity preserving framework for location-based information services
MEDES '10: Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystemsRecently, location based services (LBS) have become more important in today technology advancements. Privacy issue in LBS is one of the most important concerns. In this paper, we have proposed an anonymity preserving framework which can provide a user ...
Comments