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Web"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2018,11,30]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>As a result of the blooming of online social networks (OSNs), a user often holds accounts on multiple sites. In this article, we study the emerging \u201ccross-site linking\u201d function available on mainstream OSN services including Foursquare, Quora, and Pinterest. We first conduct a data-driven analysis on crawled profiles and social connections of all 61.39 million Foursquare users to obtain a thorough understanding of this function. Our analysis has shown that the cross-site linking function is adopted by 57.10% of all Foursquare users, and the users who have enabled this function are more active than others. We also find that the enablement of cross-site linking might lead to privacy risks. 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