Researchers of a new study have found that many users may be unintentionally divulging personal information as one in every five tweets reveals user information.
Privacy has become a major concern, especially across major social networking and microblogging sites. With the large number of recent hacks, users are more concerned about how their information on such sites is misused. However, in a new study, researchers from the University of Southern California found that users can be partly blamed for divulging personal information.
In a study that looked at 15,000 sample tweets posted on Twitter, researchers found that one in every five tweets, especially those with Hashtags divulged user location information.
"I'm a pretty private person, and I wish others would be more cautious with the types of information they share," said lead author Chris Weidemann in a press release. "There are all sorts of information that can be gleaned from things outside of the tweet itself."
Twitter has approximately 500 million active users. According to recent predictions, these users will send out approximately 72 billion tweets in 2013. Approximately six percent of these users have the opt-in feature enabled on their accounts, which reveals their location in each tweet. However, researchers found that users who don't have this feature enabled also have their location exposed.
Many Twitter users divulged their physical location directly through active location monitoring or GPS coordinates. But another 2.2 percent of all tweets, that is approximately 4.4 million tweets a day, provided so-called "ambient" location data, where the users might not be aware they are divulging their location.
"The downside is that mining this kind of information can also provide opportunities for criminal misuse of data," Weidemann said. "My intent is to educate social media users and inform the public about their privacy."
