How Your Tweets Reveal Your Home Location

technologyreview.com

14 points·schrofer··9 comments

The phrase "home location" in the headline feels a touch alarmist. They're revealing your city 68% of time, state 70% of the time, and time zone 80% of the time.

A person might not feel terribly concerned to reveal they live in the greater NYC area, while the location of their home feels more private.

While the title might just an alarmist privacy story, the article actually isn't written about that, and it's suggested examples of why this research may be of interest are for marketers and journalists, not anything privacy related.

The location of my home is in public records and also the white pages.

Anybody that wanted to do something bad to me via my address can find out where I live a lot easier than with Twitter. Also, they are only getting the city.

Not everybody can afford to publicly link their twitter identity to the aspect of their identity that has public records.

Twitter is perhaps not the best idea for them, then. I would bet you can do a city level tag just based on who you follow. I certainly follow an order of magnitude more local people than any other place -- no tweets even necessary.

While I agree with what you are saying, the article is implying that using a pseudonym doesn't necessarily mean you remain anonymous. As things you say, and when you say it, can give you away.

"when they exclude people who are obviously travelling" How do they do this? I also didn't realize all of the Red Sox fans live in Boston.

A data set containing only tweets from the 100 largest cities in the US probably doesn't generalize to the entire twitterverse

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