Privacy Leakage via De-Anonymization and Aggregation in Heterogeneous Social Networks

Abstract

Though representing a promising approach for personalization, targeting, and recommendation, aggregation of user profiles from multiple social networks will inevitably incur a serious privacy leakage issue. In this paper, we propose a Novel Heterogeneous De-anonymization Scheme (NHDS) aiming at de-anonymizing heterogeneous social networks. NHDS first leverages the network graph structure to significantly reduce the size of candidate set, then exploits user profile information to identify the correct mapping users with a high confidence. Performance evaluation on real-world social network datasets shows that NHDS significantly outperforms the prior schemes. Finally, we perform an empirical study on privacy leakage arising from cross-network aggregation based on four real-world social network datasets. Our findings show that 39.9 percent more information is disclosed through de-anonymization and the de-anonymized ratio is 84 percent. The detailed privacy leakage of user demographics and interests is also examined, which demonstrates the practicality of the identified privacy leakage issue.