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Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Antonis Papadogiannakis, Michalis Polychronakis, Apostolis Zarras, Thorsten Holz, Evangelos P. Markatos · 2013
Over the past few years, microblogging social networking services have become a popular means for information sharing and communication. Besides sharing information among friends, such services are currently being used by artists, politicians, news channels, and information providers to easily communicate with their constituency. Even though following specific channels on a microblogging service enables users to receive interesting information in a timely manner, it may raise significant privacy concerns as well. For example, the microblogging service is able to observe all the channels that a particular user follows. This way, it can infer all the subjects a user might be interested in and generate a detailed profile of this user. This knowledge can be used for a variety of purposes that are usually beyond the control of the users.