(Under)mining Privacy in Social Networks

Three Google employees have written a paper about the dangers to your online privacy due to the amount of information available from social networking sites, their activity streams, and the potential for connecting the dots (linkages) which would allow some users (or their connections) to be identified by merging social graphs (i.e. connection patterns).

Here's an excerpt of the paper's introduction:

...we point out three distinct areas where the highly-interlinked world of social networking sites can compromise user privacy. They are
• lack of control over activity streams,
• unwelcome linkage, and
• deanonymization through merging of social graphs

Src: Could your social networks spill your secrets? | New Scientist
Direct link to paper