New Delhi: If you do not remain alert online, it is really easy for the users with very little technical knowledge to find out your identity, work and home address just by a mere glance at your Twitter page.


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Reserachers from Oxford University and MIT have showcased that the location stamps on just a handful of Twitter posts, as few as eight over the course of a single day, can be enough to disclose the addresses of the poster's home and workplace to a relatively low-tech snooper.


 


The tweets themselves might be otherwise innocuous, links to funny videos, say, or comments on the news.


The location information comes from geographic coordinates automatically associated with the tweets.Twitter's location-reporting service is off by default, but many Twitter users choose to activate it.


 


The new study is part of a more general project at MIT's Internet Policy Research Initiative to help raise awareness about just how much privacy people may be giving up when they use social media.


(With ANI inputs)