Topic: 2019.01.10- Your old tweets give away more location data than you think

[Ainara BordesKeymaster]

Lapowsky, Issie (2019, January 10) Your old tweets give away more location data than you think. Wired. Accessible at https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-location-data-gps-privacy/

I found this piece of news interesting and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. The main ideas are the following:

• In 2015 Twitter changed its data privacy settings
• Before 2015, the geo-tagged tweets, even if they seemed to show only the generic location of a city, in the meta data accessible through Twitter API, showed the exact location (with few meters of error) when the tweet was posted.
• An international group of researchers developed an algorithmic tool to automatically predict the exact home and working place of a sample of people tweeting before 2015. Moreover, they also tried to extract some other sensitive information such are possible diseases of the data subject, sexual orientation etc. using only the information provided by the API. They came out with the conslussion that:
o The accuracy of the home location was 90%
o The working location a bit less
• Doing the same research after changing their policy in 2015, the accuracy went lower to 1/15.
• However, this data prior 2015 is available until today. Twitter says they do not want to delete this data unilaterally, without the users’ consent. – They also say this location could be always changed asking for help of Twitter. – However, many of the users where not aware that the location data could be so precise through Twitter API.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  Ainara Bordes.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  Ainara Bordes.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by  Ainara Bordes.

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