Automatic Individual Information Aggregation using Publicly Available Social Media Data

In this paper, we make use of freely available data on public social media sites in two ways. First, we develop a search application capable of aggregating information about an individual, using only their name as input. Second, we investigate the feasibility of mining public data and linking this information across multiple social media sites in an attempt to produce an information profile for an individual. The inspiration of our work is to allow a person to see firsthand how much information about them exists online, and how this information could potentially compromise their privacy whereas the objective of our research is to analyze the feasibility of building a profile by gathering and linking information of an individual across different social media sites. This is done in the hope of perhaps inspiring an individual pay additional heed to the privacy settings on social media accounts, and to be more vigilant about what information they choose to share online.