Methods for User Profiling across Social Networks.

Users have their accounts on multiple Online Social Networks (OSNs) to access a variety of content and connect to their friends. Consequently, user behaviors get distributed across many OSNs. Collection of comprehensive user information referred to as user profiling; an essential first step is to link user accounts (identities) belonging to the same individual across OSNs. To this end, we provide a detailed methodology of five methods useful for user profiling, which we refer to as Advanced Search Operator (ASO), Social Aggregator (SA), Cross-Platform Sharing (CPS), Self-Disclosure (SD) and Friend Finding Feature (FFF). Taken together, we collect linked identities of 208,120 individuals distributed across 43 different OSNs. We compare these methods quantitatively based on social network coverage and the number of linked identities obtained per-individual. And also perform a qualitative assessment of linked user data, thus obtained by these methods, on the criteria of completeness, validity, consistency, accuracy, and timeliness.