Yik Yak is a local anonymous bulletin board software that allows users to find out their exact location and unique IDs.
In April, he provided to the business the GPS locations of where postings and comments originated, which were precise to within 10 to 15 feet.
When it originally launched in 2013, Yik Yak was widely used on college campuses to talk, post updates, and cyberbully other students.
Due to diminishing relevance and inadequate content screening methods, the app was shut down in 2017, only to reemerge last year. The firm announced its 2 millionth users in November.
Motherboard spoke with David Teather, a Madison, Wisconsin-based computer science student who raised the security issues with Yik Yak and then published his findings in a blog post.
The software displays postings from nearby users but only provides a rough position, such as “about 1 mile away,” up to five miles, to give users a sense of where in their neighborhood updates are coming from.
Although Yik Yak claims anonymity, Teather points out that combining GPS locations and user IDs might de-anonymize users and reveal where they reside, given that many individuals are likely to use it from home and the data is accurate to within 10 to 15 feet.
Because a GPS position may restrict a user down to one address, Teather believes the risk is higher for persons who live in rural regions where residences are more than 10 to 15 feet apart.
Researchers like Teather can access the data because they know how to utilize tools and build code to extract information — yet the risk was substantial enough for Teather to bring it to Yik Yak’s notice.
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