Who's Who: Linking User's Multiple Identities on Online Social Media

On online social media, users join new online social networks (OSNs) to exploit variety of services while maintaining their old identities on other OSNs. A user maintains an identity on each OSN mentioning metadata (e.g. profile information) about her. Heterogeneity of metadata shared by user across OSNs leads to a problem of finding if two online identities on multiple OSNs belong to the same user or different users. In this work, we attempt to understand that to what extent can we link multiple online identities of a user or disambiguate identities of different users, using an easily accessible and public attribute – username. The solution to the problem has multiple applications. In privacy domain, the problem finds its application in understanding the quantity and quality of the user’s information leakages via either aggregation of user’s information from OSNs or differences in privacy policies of multiple social networks. In system building domain, the solution can help in building recommendation feature for social aggregation sites. In security domain, the solution can help in linking malicious user accounts present on multiple OSNs.