Social media has become a part of everyday life. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, you’re probably even familiar with posts that show a friend’s exact location.

Like to tweet? Make sure you aren't letting people know exactly where yoy are by accident.

As you may suspect, this can be very dangerous since it allows others to know exactly where you are at all times. So you can opt to turn off your geotagging settings, but what happens when your social media sites can access your location, even if you don’t offer it up.

 
Twitter users can reveal their exact location.

To deal with this issue, a University of Southern California (USC) researcher has created an application that lets you test your own location footprint.

Graduate student Chris Weidemann conducted the study that sampled 15 million tweets. What he found was that some Twitter users may be inadvertently revealing their locations through various means, such as through the metadata in their photos or by naming a specific restaurant or hotel where they are.

“There are all sorts of information that can be gleaned from things outside of the tweet itself," said Weidemann.

Twitter has about 500 million active users that are predicted to produce a total of 72 billion tweets in 2013. Only about 6% of these Twitter users actually choose to broadcast their location with every tweet, but even people who don’t choose to share than information can let others know where they are.



In order to understand how publicly accessible data works, Weidemann created an application called Twitter2GIS that can analyze the metadata collected by Twitter (this information is generated by Twitter’s application programming interface). He then processed the information with a software program that identifies the trends.

In his one week sampling period, he found that about 20% of the tweets actually showed a user’s location so accurately that you could locate their exact street or even better.

A lot of users gave their location willingly by using their GPS function. However, 2.2% of all tweets (about 4.4 million per day) provided “ambient” location data, which implies that users may not even be aware that they’re divulging this information.

“The downside is that mining this kind of information can also provide opportunities for criminal misuse of data,” said Weidemann.

The Twitter2GIS application is now available to the public so you can view your own location footprint. Try out Weidemann’s beta version of the Twitter2GIS and give him some feedback.
Story via University of Southern California.