HOW TO HIDE WITHIN A SOCIAL NETWORK
Facebook and other online network resources make it hard to be undetected in a social network, which many people desire for their own privacy purposes. While individuals are able to restrict public knowledge of their personal lives and information, they are unable to be completely off the grid simply by the fact that they are in a network. Private information such as names and addresses can be hidden, but one can not hide their position in a network. Marcin Wakiek, a Polish computer scientist, published his findings of an algorithm, called Remove One Add Many (ROAM) that could be used to hide figures in a network. Wakiek claims this algorithm can aid people who desire more privacy and assist counter-terrorism/law enforcement in understanding how criminal organizations could hide important members of their networks.
The main idea that the algorithm revolves around is that of “centrality”. This relates to the number of connections a node has in a network, and is used to explain how to effectively hide in a network. The algorithm has two factors; first to hide a node in a network one must remove its connections to other nodes, and second, the connections from the node attempting to be hidden must be ‘re-routed,’ completing the “add many” aspect of the algorithm. This is essentially removing important connections and replacing them with less significant connections.
Waniek does not view this as a strictly positive thing, as he values the desire of individuals for privacy. He does maintain that this algorithm will benefit law enforcement by using it the way described above and by looking at oddly significant changes in social networks when connections are modified, possibly revealing a concealed criminal.
This article relates directly to our lectures relating to graph theory, but adds an interesting perspective on attempting to conceal one’s position or identity within a graph. We focused in class on making connections and never looking at how one could actively hide one’s position in a network. While the article mentioned this algorithm gets incredibly complex, the theory behind it is comprehensive and able to be actively pondered and discussed after our lectures. I found this article incredibly interesting because it also reveals how many different fields of study go into one field, namely law enforcement/counter-terrorist forces. There is a never ending study into the predictability of life and interactions and this article highlighted the difficulties of finding people who want to be hidden from a human and computable perspective.
Article Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw5yw7/how-to-hide-within-a-social-network