University of Maryland Study Reveals Privacy Risks in Multi-App Messaging Habits
A new study by the University of Maryland (UMD) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has uncovered significant privacy risks associated with users juggling multiple messaging applications. Researchers, including Yonghwi Kwon from UMD, demonstrated how seemingly isolated pieces of metadata across platforms like Telegram, WhatsApp, Tinder, and KakaoTalk can be chained together to reveal real identities and pinpoint physical locations. This is achieved without breaking encryption or reading private messages. The study, titled 'Connecting the Dots: An Investigative Study on Linking Private User Data Across Messaging Apps,' was presented at the 2026 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. The team found that security protections within one platform can be undermined by permissive defaults on another, especially when users reuse identifiers like phone numbers or photos across different accounts. Following the disclosure of these findings, affected platforms updated...