[NetBehaviour] Could your social networks spill your secrets?

[info]

Could your social networks spill your secrets?

In an article at the end of last year we looked at some of the ways 
data-mining techniques are being used by marketeers and security 
services to extract sometimes private information by assembling huge 
amounts of data from web visits, emails, purchases, and more.

Now researchers at Google caution in a paper (pdf) that by becoming 
entangled in ever more social networks online, people are building up 
their own piles of revealing data. And as more websites gain social 
features, even the things users strive to keep private won't necessarily 
stay that way, they suggest.
As a hypothetical example, combining public information on, say, the 
business social network LinkedIn with that on another like MySpace could 
reveal that one of your key business contacts spends their free time in 
full Kiss makeup, even their two profiles are kept relatively anonymous 
and are not linked directly in any way.

That approach is dubbed "merging social graphs" by the researchers. In 
fact, it has already been used to identify some users of the DVD rental 
site Netflix, from a supposedly anonymised dataset released by the 
company. The identities were revealed by combining the Netflix data with 
user activity on movie database site IMDb.

The Google team's proposed solution is a kind of privacy warning system. 
When you sign up for a new online service, it would take a look on the 
internet and let you know if there's a risk that the new information you 
are uploading could be used to make connections about you.

more...
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/01/what-your-social-network-can-r.html