Yik Yak Users Not So Anonymous After All

By Dian Schaffhauser 10/20/16

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/10/20/yik-yak-users-not-so-anonymous-after-all.aspx

yakkers had add personal handles and profiles starting last August. users of mobile app Yik Yak face the ignominy of being truly discoverable. At least that’s what a research team at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering suggests in a new paper.

“You Can Yak but You Can’t Hide: Localizing Anonymous Social Network Users,” being presented at the upcoming ACM Internet Measurements Conference next month, describes how the research team was able to determine the geographical origin of a comment or “yak” and possibly even the person who made the post, thereby making the program susceptible to “localization attacks,” putting the user at risk of being identified.

if a student posted a disparaging remark about a fellow student or a faculty member, “it wouldn’t be difficult” for the victim of the insult to figure out where the offensive commentary was posted from and then pinpoint the probable yakker from there.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy