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Suppose you have an online social service like Facebook that might make it interesting for companies to create many accounts (e.g. to "Like" their posts).

Of course, you want to prevent the users to do something like that. Lets say, ideally you want at most one user per real person (I think there are company accounts in Facebook, but Facebook was only an example!).

How can you make sure, that no person is able to create and use multiple accounts? Are there publications about this topic? (Preferably free and publicly available)

Related questions

A similar question was asked here and I had many ideas how to approach this problem (see my answer). But although the question is similar, my focus in this question are references that discuss the topic. References might be blog articles and websites, but I would prefer papers / books.

Questions

  • Are there publications
    • that describe how to identify fake users in general?
    • that describe how to use the social graph for identifying fake users?
  • (Are there other ideas I did not list in my answer?)

Clarification

It doesn't matter if users create multiple accounts. It's ok if they create one account, use it, lose their credentials and create a new one they use.

It is not ok to create multiple accounts to manipulate counts (e.g. Like, +1, YouTube clicks, responses to an article, ...)

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Martin Thoma
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  • You can never be sure that a person cannot create multiple accounts unless you require them to input a valid passport number (and even then CIA people may have multiple). Instead, you have to focus on behaviors of those with multiple accounts that you dislike and kill them. Generally speaking, you are fine if I manage to create an account for my pet dog, but in trouble if a corporation creates 1000 new users to "like" their page. It is an arms race. For any algorithm to detect the problem, there is a workaround for the companies. – Cort Ammon Sep 12 '13 at 06:35
  • It all depends on what you are trying to achive. If you want to do something like fair "liking" or "voting", it would be more useful to identify double accounts and link them together and the only count one vote in a time period. If your website doesn't display votes live, but only updates every hour someone trying to use multiple accounts has a very hard time gaming this system. [lso](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSO_cookie)s will be useful to identify multiple accounts in combination with IP and email confirmation it will help against most accounts. – 576i Sep 12 '13 at 06:40

1 Answers1

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See my answers here and here. They don't refer to any specific publications, which I would be surprised to see, because of so different reasons why addressing this problem in first place (see these links for more discussion on that) and that post about being user-friendly.

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Dmitri Zaitsev
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