Account Reachability: A Measure of Privacy Risk for Exposure of a User's Multiple SNS Accounts

With the increased worldwide popularity of social networking services (SNSs), the leakage of a user's private information is becoming a serious problem. An increased number of users now have multiple accounts on various social networks and they tend to use each account to write different user experiments. Aggregating information from different accounts leads to the unintended leakage of personal information. Therefore, we argue that SNS users should be vigilant in protecting the relationship between multiple accounts. In this paper, we propose the use of Account Reachability, a measure of privacy risk which demonstrates the possibility of a stranger finding a user's private account based on information in their public account. In addition, we present ARChecker, a tool to calculate the value of account reachability. ARChecker also provides advice on how to modify the user's profiles and messages to decrease the privacy risk. By checking the privacy measure and modifying the profiles and messages of their SNS accounts, users can protect their multiple accounts from the risk of an unintended leakage of personal information.