Profiling, Tracking, and Monetizing: Analysis of Internet & Online Social Network Concerns

This research explores concerns facing Internet, specifically Online Social Network, users. The attacks we discuss can lead to identity theft, biased and tailored website content delivery, geolocation threats, monetization, and an overall lack of privacy. We introduce a profiling and tracking attack that correlates a user’s online persona that is captured from seemingly innocuous website traffic (e.g., operating system, search engine, browser, time spent on website, etc.) with that of the same user’s real Facebook profile through analytics captured from a custom Facebook Fan Page. We show how an adversary might identify the personally identifiable information of the user given only their online persona.