understanding cross-site linking in online social networks
TRANSCRIPT
Understanding Cross-site Linking inOnline Social Networks
Yang Chen1, Chenfan Zhuang2, Qiang Cao1, Pan Hui31Duke University
2Tsinghua University3Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Motivation
• A number of OSN sites with different functionality
• It is quite common for an individual user to have multiple accounts on different OSN sites.– How to efficiently manage accounts on different OSNs?
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Interact with friends Share breaking news
Job search Location-centric social interactions
The Cross-site Linking Function
The cross-site linking function allows a user to link her account on one OSN site to her accounts on other OSN sites
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Cross-site Linking: Advantages
• Make cross-site content posting easy
– Help Foursquare users automatically post tips to Facebook and Twitter
• Avoid repeated efforts in social connection establishment– Import the contact list from other OSNs
• Provide more information of a user– Visit the linked profiles on other OSNs
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Why Foursquare?
• A representative LBSN service, one of the most popular OSN sites– Foursquare app: customized discovery and
recommendation engine
– Swarm app: real-time location sharing with friends
• Supports the cross-site linking function– A user can link his profile to Facebook/Twitter
• Every Foursquare user has a public profile page (http://foursquare.com/user/ID/)
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Data Collection
• Goal: analyze the entire Foursquare user base– To avoid the disadvantages of biased sampling
• Challenge: IP-based rate limiting– Crowd crawling:100 crawlers around the United
States, each crawls one chunk of IDs
• Data– Collected between Jul. 22th, 2014 and Jul. 29th, 2014– Public profiles of 51.15 million Foursquare users
• Almost all (if not all) Foursquare users
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ID Gender Tips Checkins Friends Facebook Twitter …
123 male 5 28 10 15576473 eric_c …
Linking Options
Twitter Facebook Linking Option Percentage
Yes No TW only 3.82%
No Yes FB only 44.19%
Yes Yes FB+TW 11.96%
No No Neither 40.03%
• About 60% Foursquare users have enabled the cross-site linking function
• 56.15% users have added their Facebook accounts• 15.78% users have added their Twitter accounts
The cross-site linking function is widely used among Foursquare users7
Percentage Distribution of Linking Options
Group-based Analysis: Gender
Very little difference between male users and female users in terms of the distribution of linking options
Gender options: 51.52% Male 42.92% Female 5.56% Rather not say
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Group-based Analysis: Country
Top four countries: USA (27.61%) Turkey (9.49%) Indonesia (8.17%) Brazil (7.04%)
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Country BRA IDN TUR USA
Percentage 82.25% 50.51% 80.33% 50.33%
Percentage of users that have enabled cross-site linking
Group-based Analysis: Activity
• Two factors: social connections and location-centric activities (leaving tips, check-ins)
# of Friends # of Checkins and Tips Group Percentage
=0 =0 Zombies 28.23%
=0 >0 Loners 9.50%
>0 =0 Watchers 14.02%
>0 >0 Ordinary users 48.25%
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Group-based Analysis: Activity (cont.)
Most zombies/loners have not enabled cross-site linking, as they are socially isolated. Watchers v.s. Orindary users
Watchers are less motivated to link to Twitter, as they don’t publish 73% watchers and 71% ordinary users have linked to Facebook (users from both
groups are connected with other Foursquare users)11
Behavioral Difference among Users with
Different Linking Options
• Users who have enabled the cross-site linking function are more “active”– Cross-site linking will deliver published contents to more prospective audience
• “TW only” > “FB only”– Publicly viewable tweets can be quickly spread through the Twitter network– FB user status is only visible to friends by default (fewer possible audiences)
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User Privacy Concerns & Cross-site Linking
Profile Picture
Gender Residential Location
Last Name Biography
Enabled (%) 66.99% 94.44% 91.68% 94.61% 3.29%
Disabled (%) 33.01% 5.56% 8.32% 5.39% 96.71%
In Foursquare, users can customize their profiles according to privacy concerns (a user can choose whether to enable an optional field)
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Alice’s Foursquare Profile
Alice’s Facebook Profile
Alice’s Twitter Profile
More information about Alice!!
Intuitively, cross-site linking might cause concerns for users
who care a lot about their privacy.
User Privacy Concerns & Cross-site Linking (cont.)
Whether or not uploading personalized profile photo is an indicator for the adoption of cross-site linking
Enabling any of the five optional field indicates a higher probability of using the cross-site linking function
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Cross-site Information Consistency
First Name Last Name Gender
Percentage of users who have entered identical information in a selected filed
89.84% 87.02% 99.30%
Cross-site Information Consistency (“Foursquare-Facebook”)
Users have a high probability to manifest cross-site information consistency
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A user might choose to expose the same or different personal information on different sites
Cross-site Information Aggregation
User Info
Foursquare Twitter
ID Gender Tips … ID Tweets Lists …
USER A 1 m 10 … 1982 100 17 …
USER B 2 f 20 … 34 5 0 …
USER C 5 f 0 … 19903 20 1 …
USER D 9 m 7 … 563122 7 4 …
… … … … … … … … …
• Aggregate the information of the same user from different OSN sites (learn more about a user)
• Applications: friend suggestion, point-of-interest recommendation, personalized advertising, …
• Example: gender-based analysis of Twitter16
Gender-based Analysis of Twitter
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Female users publish more tweets Male users are involved in more lists
Gender-based Analysis of Twitter (cont.)
URL Description Location
Male 32.07% 62.82% 56.87%
Female 25.02% 64.73% 57.35%
The Use of Optional Fields (%)
Male users have a higher probability to add a URL Both male and female users have a nearly 63%
probability of adding a description, and a nearly 57% probability to add the location information.
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Related Work
• Cross-OSN linking papers– Ottoni et al. [ICWSM 2014]: Pinterest-Twitter linking– Chen et al. [WOSN 2012]: Google+– Both of them used biased sampling methods, while our study is
based on the entire Foursquare user population
• Wang et al. [IEEE Internet Computing, 2014] compared a series of user activities across Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter– We focus on the cross-site linking function
• Goga et al. [WWW 2013], Liu et al. [SIGMOD 2014] investigated how to identify accounts on different OSNs that all are owned by the same user– Useful for the OSN sites which do not support the cross-site
linking function
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Conclusion
• About 60% of Foursquare users have enabled the cross-site linking function, and these users are more active than other users
• Adding contents to an optional field indicates a higher probability of activating the cross-site linking function
• If a Foursquare user has linked his account to Facebook, he will have a high chance to provide consistent information to both Foursquare and Facebook
• The use of cross-site information aggregation helps us investigate the gender difference in using Twitter
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Future Work
• Investigate cross-site links among more mainstream OSN sites– Discover general patterns to characterize cross-OSN
links
• A volunteer-based study – Access the non-publicly viewable data (e.g.: check-in
history) a deeper investigation into cross-site information aggregation
• Build practical services/applications based on cross-site links– Malicious account detection
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