Privacy threats during a pandemic: a Twitter case study

A new “normal” for how people live and work resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting the lives of everyone worldwide. Working from home, online shopping,
remote learning, and virtual meetings became routine activities. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter also saw a sharp increase in usage, giving rise to new cybercrimes,
enabling attackers to prey on users of social media sites while they are feeling vulnerable, fearful, or uncertain. The threats include phishing, stealing users’ sensitive information,
and exposure to false information. Therefore, it is critical to examine how changes during the pandemic affected the security and privacy of users.

This research article does a thorough investigation to determine how the situation (e.g. lockdowns) during the COVID-19 epidemic affected social media users’ privacy. Using a
dataset of 10.2 million tweets about COVID-19, we analyse users’ security and privacy practices over three different time frames (i.e., before, during, and after lockdown). Our research demonstrates that while tweeting during the pandemic, users unwittingly divulge more personal identifiable information (such as the name of the building or a nearby coronavirus testing site). Our analysis reveals that if a user tweets three or more private tweets regarding the epidemic, the privacy risk is 100%.