Reviewing review platforms: a privacy perspective

Abstract

Many tourists heavily rely on online review platforms for decisions with respect to food, visits and hotel bookings today. Review communities rigorously log all experiences on popular online platforms such as Google Maps, Tripadvisor and Yelp. However, many contributors are unaware that, along with experiences, a lot of sensitive information is often indirectly exposed to platform visitors. Examples are reviewer’s locations in the privacy sphere, age, medical information and financial status. Malicious entities could potentially employ this information in various ways, for example during extortion or targeted phishing attempts. This work outlines the potential risks for contributors on review platforms. The Google Maps review platform is applied as a prototypical example, with a special focus on predicting the reviewer’s home location. The accuracy of our predictions is assessed by relying on ground truth datasets. This paper further presents and evaluates strategies to tackle common problems.