  Microblogging is a very popular Internet activity that informs and entertains
great multitudes of people world-wide via quickly and scalably disseminated
terse messages containing all kinds of newsworthy utterances. Even though
microblogging is neither designed nor meant to emphasize privacy, numerous
contributors hide behind pseudonyms and compartmentalize their different
incarnations via multiple accounts within the same, or across multiple,
site(s). Prior work has shown that stylometric analysis is a very powerful tool
capable of linking product or service reviews and blogs that are produced by
the same author when the number of authors is large. In this paper, we explore
linkability of tweets. Our results, based on a very large corpus of tweets,
clearly demonstrate that, at least for relatively active tweeters, linkability
of tweets by the same author is easily attained even when the number of
tweeters is large. We also show that our linkability results hold for a set of
actual Twitter users who tweet from multiple accounts. This has some obvious
privacy implications, both positive and negative.
