Your Twitter account reveals a lot more about you than you think

It takes only eight tweets to figure out important details about you such as your place of work and residence even for the not so tech-savvy people, finds a new research.

It takes only eight tweets to figure out important details about you such as your place of work and residence even for the not so tech-savvy people, finds a new research.

(REUTERS)

Researchers at MIT and Oxford University have shown that the location stamps on just a handful of Twitter posts, as few as eight over the course of a single day, can be enough to disclose the addresses of the poster’s home and workplace to a relatively low-tech snooper.

Read: Signing up on another social media site? You may want to think again

The tweets themselves might be otherwise innocuous, links to funny videos, say, or comments on the news. The location information comes from geographic coordinates automatically associated with the tweets.

Twitter’s location-reporting service is off by default, but many Twitter users choose to activate it. The new study is part of a more general project at MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative to help raise awareness about just how much privacy people may be giving up when they use social media.

Read: Govt to monitor social media 24x7 to counter negative comments, blogs

First author Ilaria Liccardi said that with this study, they wanted to show that when you send location data as a secondary piece of information, it is extremely simple for people with very little technical knowledge to find out where you work or live.

The research has been presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Follow @htlifeandstyle for more.