IBM Boffins KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE, thanks to Twitter

If you thought refraining from geotagging your Tweets or photos was enough to keep your secrets from the world at large, think again: IBM researchers say a Twitter user's primary location can be inferred from their behaviour, with accuracy as high as 68 per cent. In this paper at Arxiv, Jalal Mahmud, Jeffrey Nichols and …

[Anonymous Coward]

Well doh!

As a non user of Twatter or Faceblock I have to say,

Well Doh! Didn't you realize this ages ago?

You sign up for those Borg services and this is what you get when you cease to be an individual and become part of the 'collective'.

[Eddy Ito]

HAH!

That's why I have my computer to send computer generated tweets at pseudo-random intervals. The next tweet you see from me at midnight saying I'm headed down to Cafe Du Monde for a light lunch know that I could be asleep and it's really 2 am where I am. Oh and that re-tweet everyone thought so timely and interesting, Ha! I was probably gettin' my funk on to some heavy Die Walküre or Die Fledermaus bombin' down die 5, bitches!

Of course the SoCal under location might give it away. Nah! That could easily be short for South Caledonia.

[ammabamma]

I'll give you something to track!

They use tweet-time timezone estimation and location names in the tweets as a basis for locating the Twitter Twatter? hmmmm...

Burkina Faso is GMT...

What say all us El-Reg commentards start tweeting from Ouagadougou? That should give Messrs Jalal Mahmud, Jeffrey Nichols and Clemens Drews some interesting data points to correlate.

Mine's the hand-woven bògòlanfini mud cloth one please.

[Pete 2]

Persons, places and things

So if you tweeted:

It's great to see Paris again or

Just got back to Devon, or even

Philly is a sight for sore eyes

Would you infer a location, the name of a partner or even just being reunited with your pet dog?

Given the old adage that There are lots of girls in Watford called Chelsea but no girls in Chelsea called Watford, this sort of "magicking data out of nothing" is a very haphazard affair.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Persons, places and things

"magicking data out of nothing"

Everybody's doing it these days it seems. Unfortunately it's very similar to "nothing out of data".

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Paris?

Paris Texas, Paris Utah, or the real deal?

OK, geo-tagging and time zone info can help, but an effin' big Eiffel Tower in the picture should give us a hint.

Garçon, l'addition s'il vous plait!

[~mico]

Re: Paris?

I'll take Hilton. The hotel, of course. Yes, this is my coat.

[John Smith 19]

Handy if you have access to all the Twitter accounts..

Hmm.

Yes I see what IBM meant when they said they have handed no data over to the NSA.

[tom dial]

Re: Handy if you have access to all the Twitter accounts..

When did the output of Twitter qualify even marginally as "private" or reading it as "snooping"? No access to "Twitter accounts" would seem necessary.

[Robert Grant]

"As high as 68%"

This is data accuracy, not investment returns. A upper limit of 68% isn't really that good.

[ItsNotMe]

Well...

...if one is such a narcissistic twat, that they feel they have a need to tell the world where they are, and what they are doing, at any given second, then who really cares what happens to them? Not moi.

If you are stupid enough to use these asinine social networking programs...then simply deal with their consequences...and stop whining when you are assaulted, or your home is burglarized.

[Stevie]

Re: Well...

I'm in New York in case you were wondering.

[Stevie]

Bah!

I burst out laughing when I read that sub-title just as The Boss wandered into theater.

Busted for reading El Reg instead of working AGAIN, dammit!