Researchers from MIT and Oxford University have come up with a new research which states that it only takes 8 tweets to reveal your identity, the place of your work and your home address.

A techie with a very basic set of skills can totally find out these details with merely 8 tweets of yours. 

This happens if your ‘Tweet Location’ option is on.This option features in the Security and Privacy section of the Settings page, and is turned off by default. But most Twitter users prefer to activate this feature and that is all what is needed to figure out your address.

The whole concept is all the more intriguing because the content of your tweets does not matter here. You could be sharing anything from funny videos to your political opinion and might just lay all your personal details on the platter without even knowing. 

All that’s needed is activated location settings and 7-8 regular tweets to establish a pattern for a low-tech snooper to extract the aforementioned details about you.

The study is part of a bigger project which was presented for MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative to help raise awareness regarding how one would be compromising his/her privacy over the Internet (especially social media). 

   

This research had been presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and has created quite a buzz, ever since. 

We know there is someone, somewhere monitoring our Internet activities, but this is creepier, given that absolutely anybody with meager tech knowledge could find out who we are and where we live. 

It’s just getting difficult to keep up with all the Internet Do’s and Don’ts now, isn’t it?