Evolution of Privacy Loss in Wikipedia
Authors | Marian-Andrei Rizoiu Lexing Xie Tibério S. Caetano Manuel Cebrian |
|---|---|
Publication date | 2016 |
DOI | 10.1145/2835776.2835798 |
Links | Original Preprint |
Evolution of Privacy Loss in Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2016, written by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Lexing Xie, Tibério S. Caetano and Manuel Cebrian.
Overview
The cumulative effect of collective online participation has an important and adverse impact on individual privacy. As an online system evolves over time, new digital traces of individual behavior may uncover previously hidden statistical links between an individual's past actions and her private traits. To quantify this effect, authors analyze the evolution of individual privacy loss by studying the edit history of Wikipedia over 13 years, including more than 117,523 different users performing 188,805,088 edits. Authors trace each Wikipedia's contributor using apparently harmless features, such as the number of edits performed on predefined broad categories in a given time period (e.g. Mathematics, Culture or Nature). Authors show that even at this unspecific level of behavior description, it is possible to use off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms to uncover usually undisclosed personal traits, such as gender, religion or education. Authors provide empirical evidence that the prediction accuracy for almost all private traits consistently improves over time. Surprisingly, the prediction performance for users who stopped editing after a given time still improves. The activities performed by new users seem to have contributed more to this effect than additional activities from existing (but still active) users. Insights from this work should help users, system designers, and policy makers understand and make long-term design choices in online content creation systems.
