As a result of the blooming of online social networks (OSNs), a user often holds accounts on multiple sites. In this article, we study the emerging “cross-site linking” function available on mainstream OSN services including Foursquare, Quora, and Pinterest. We first conduct a data-driven analysis on crawled profiles and social connections of all 61.39 million Foursquare users to obtain a thorough understanding of this function. Our analysis has shown that the cross-site linking function is adopted by 57.10% of all Foursquare users, and the users who have enabled this function are more active than others. We also find that the enablement of cross-site linking might lead to privacy risks. Based on cross-site links between Foursquare and external OSN sites, we formulate cross-site information aggregation as a problem that uses cross-site links to stitch together site-local information fields for OSN users. Using large datasets collected from Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter, we demonstrate the usefulness and the challenges of cross-site information aggregation. In addition to the measurements, we carry out a survey collecting detailed user feedback on cross-site linking. This survey studies why people choose to or not to enable cross-site linking, as well as the motivation and concerns of enabling this function.

中文翻译：

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了解在线社交网络中的跨站点链接

由于在线社交网络 (OSN) 的蓬勃发展，用户经常在多个站点上拥有帐户。在本文中，我们研究了包括 Foursquare、Quora 和 Pinterest 在内的主流 OSN 服务上新兴的“跨站链接”功能。我们首先对所有 6139 万 Foursquare 用户的爬取个人资料和社交关系进行数据驱动分析，以全面了解该功能。我们的分析表明，57.10% 的 Foursquare 用户都使用了跨站链接功能，并且启用该功能的用户比其他用户更活跃。我们还发现，启用跨站点链接可能会导致隐私风险。基于 Foursquare 和外部 OSN 站点之间的跨站点链接，我们将跨站点信息聚合制定为使用跨站点链接为 OSN 用户拼接站点本地信息字段的问题。使用从 Foursquare、Facebook 和 Twitter 收集的大型数据集，我们展示了跨站点信息聚合的有用性和挑战。除了测量之外，我们还进行了一项调查，收集有关跨站点链接的详细用户反馈。该调查研究了人们选择或不启用跨站点链接的原因，以及启用此功能的动机和顾虑。我们进行了一项调查，收集有关跨站点链接的详细用户反馈。该调查研究了人们选择或不启用跨站点链接的原因，以及启用此功能的动机和顾虑。我们进行了一项调查，收集有关跨站点链接的详细用户反馈。该调查研究了人们选择或不启用跨站点链接的原因，以及启用此功能的动机和顾虑。