Understanding Cross-site Linking in Online Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) have attracted billions of users, and play an important role in people’s daily life. A user often has accounts on multiple OSN sites. In this pa-per, we study the emerging “cross-site linking ” function, which is supported by many OSNs. Our study is based on Foursquare, a representative location-based social net-working (LBSN) service. We conduct a data-driven analysis by using crawled public profiles of almost all (if not all) Foursquare users. Our analysis has shown that the cross-site linking function is widely adopted by Foursquare users, and the users who have enabled this function are more ac-tive than other users. We have also found that users who are more concerned with online privacy have a lower prob-ability to enable the cross-site linking function. Besides analyzing crawled Foursquare user profiles, we further ex-plore cross-site linking between Foursquare and other OSN sites, i.e., Facebook and Twitter. The study on“Foursquare-Facebook ” linking indicates that users have a high proba-bility to provide consistent information to different OSNs. Meanwhile, “Foursquare-Twitter ” linking is used to demon-strate the usefulness of aggregating user-generated content across multiple OSN sites. We present a gender-based anal-ysis of Twitter, which is made accurate by leveraging cross-site links between Foursquare and Twitter