No it can't. This story keeps getting posted all over the internet.
Not only is it wrong, and not only do the researchers refuse to show their work (citing possible "misuse"), but it entirely depends on what kind of OPSEC failures the user happens to make.
If 90% of LinkedIn users are making the same OPSEC errors, then I'd say it works as advertised.
Guess it's a good thing I don't use any social media with my real identity.
Right?
I have a linked in account which I haven't touched in years, from a machine that no lonhers exists, on an internet connection I left behind.
Good luck connectinge to that.
60% of the time it works every time
67% of the time it works 90% of the time according to the article
So people without linkedin profiles are 100% safe?
What does 67% at 90% precision mean
six seven
Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.
I take that to mean there is a 90% match between anonymized posts and real life profiles for 68% of users and that it’s a minimum confidence level needed for a user to be considered deanonymized.
67% made a match. 90% of matches were right.
No idea how they got that number, though.
Precision: ratio of true positives to total predicted positives.
Recall: ratio of true positives to actual positives
This headline sucks.
They made a model of accounts that willingly linked their hackernews profiles to their linked-ins and made a model base on that (n= approx 990)
They could "deanonymise" about 67% of those accounts from that n=990 candidate pool (alpha=.1) using their model (they already knew who they were, otherwise how could they verify a correct match?).
When they threw in a bunch of accounts that had nothing to do with those first accounts (89k total accounts) accuracy dropped to around 55%-45% depending on choice of technique.
first thing, those hn accts they trained on weren't trying to be anonymous. They linked to their linked in profile. So, lie on the internet I guess
this is just a starting point anyway, cheap and fast. That's what to worry about. $1-$4 per account you're trying to doxx like this.
Just an interesting paper.