Profile Reconciliation Through Dynamic Activities Across Social Networks

Abstract

Since today’s online social media serve diverse purposes such as social and professional networking, photo and blog sharing, it is not uncommon for people to have multiple profiles across different social networks. Finding or reconciling these profiles would allow the creation of a holistic view of different facets of a person’s life that can be used by recommender systems, human resource management, marketing activities and also raise awareness about the potential threats to one person’s privacy. In this paper, we propose a new approach for reconciling profiles based on their temporal activity (i.e., timestamped posts) shared across similar-scope social networks. The timestamped posts are compared by considering different dynamic attributes originating from what the user shares (geographical data, text, tags, and photos) and static attributes (username and real name). Our evaluation on Flickr and Twitter social networks datasets shows that the temporal activity is a good predictor of two profiles referring or not to the same user.