This does not surprise me at all. Chris Stokel-Walker reports:
Metadata is everywhere. Everything you tweet, every picture you take, and every status update you post on Facebook. It’s used by police and security forces to identify people who try to hide their identities and locations, while associated metadata in selfies can inadvertently ensnare criminals unaware that the data can destroy their alibi.
And metadata on Twitter can also be used in extremely precise identification each and every one of us – according to a new paper by researchers at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. Your tweets, it turns out, no matter how anonymous you might think they are, can be traced back to you with unerring accuracy. All someone needs to do is look at the metadata.
The scientists used tweets and the associated metadata to identify any user in a group of 10,000 Twitter users with 96.7 per cent accuracy.
Read more on Wired (UK).
h/t, Joe Cadillic