Finding "hidden" connections on linkedIn an argument for more pragmatic social network privacy

Social networking services well know that some users are unwilling to freely share the information they store with the service (e.g. profile information). To address this, services typically provide various privacy “knobs” that the user may adjust to limit access by content type or user identity. However, the main purpose of social networks, community building, is largely at odds with this, hence it is unsurprising that privacy breaches in social networks are increasingly discovered. We argue that this tension between social networking goals and privacy suggests that research efforts should be focused more on efficient methods for detecting privacy breaches in social networks and on building user awareness of privacy risks and the trade-off between privacy and utility. We support our argument with a simple method for discovering LinkedIn contacts ostensibly hidden by privacy settings. This method appears discoverable with a straightforward analysis of the LinkedIn system and it...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Jessica Staddon
• Keywords: CCS 2009, Privacy, Privacy Breaches, Security Privacy, Social Network