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Reviewing review platforms: a privacy perspective

Published: 23 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Many tourists heavily rely on online review platforms for decisions with respect to food, visits and hotel bookings today. Review communities rigorously log all experiences on popular online platforms such as Google Maps, Tripadvisor and Yelp. However, many contributors are unaware that, along with experiences, a lot of sensitive information is often indirectly exposed to platform visitors. Examples are reviewer’s locations in the privacy sphere, age, medical information and financial status. Malicious entities could potentially employ this information in various ways, for example during extortion or targeted phishing attempts. This work outlines the potential risks for contributors on review platforms. The Google Maps review platform is applied as a prototypical example, with a special focus on predicting the reviewer’s home location. The accuracy of our predictions is assessed by relying on ground truth datasets. This paper further presents and evaluates strategies to tackle common problems.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Compromising anonymity in identity-reserved k-anonymous datasets through aggregate knowledgeProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3664476.3664489(1-12)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ARES '22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
August 2022
1371 pages
ISBN:9781450396707
DOI:10.1145/3538969
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 August 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Privacy
  2. identification attack
  3. review platforms

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ARES 2022

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Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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View all
  • (2024)Compromising anonymity in identity-reserved k-anonymous datasets through aggregate knowledgeProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3664476.3664489(1-12)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024

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