Sherlock holmes' evil twin
Gerald H Friedland, Gregor Maier, Robin Sommer, Nicholas C. Weaver · 2011
User-supplied content--in the form of photos, videos, and text--is a crucial ingredient to many web sites and services today. However, many users who provide content do not realize that their uploads may be leaking personal information in forms hard to intuitively grasp. Correlation of seemingly innocuous information can create inference chains that tell much more about individuals than they are aware of revealing. We contend that adversaries can systematically exploit such relationships by correlating information from different sources in what we term global inference attacks: assembling a comprehensive understanding from individual pieces found at a variety of locations, Sherlock-style. Not only are such attacks already technically viable given the capabilities that today's multimedia content analysis and correlation technologies readily provide, but we also find business models that provide adversaries with powerful incentives for pursuing them.