TY - GEN
T1 - Privacy risk assessment on online photos
AU - Xu, Haitao
AU - Wang, Haining
AU - Stavrou, Angelos
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank our shepherd Chris Kanich and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and detailed comments. This work was partially supported by ARO grant W911NF-15-1-0287 and ONR grant N00014-13-1-0088. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - With the rising popularity of cameras and people’s increasing desire to share photos, an overwhelming number of photos have been posted all over the Web. A digital photo usually contains much information in its metadata. Once published online, a photo could disclose much more information beyond what is visually depicted in the photo and what the owner expects to share. The metadata contained in digital photos could pose significant privacy threats to their owners. Our work aims to raise public awareness of privacy risks resulting from sharing photos online and subsequent photo handling conducted by contemporary media sites. To this end, we investigated the prevalence of metadata information among digital photos and assessed the potential privacy risks arising from the metadata information. We also studied the policies adopted by online media sites on handling the metadata information embedded in the photos they host. We examined nearly 100,000 photos collected from over 600 top-ranked websites in seven categories and found that the photo handling policy adopted by a site largely varies depending on the category of the site. We demonstrated that some trivial looking metadata information suffices to mount real-world attacks against photo owners.
AB - With the rising popularity of cameras and people’s increasing desire to share photos, an overwhelming number of photos have been posted all over the Web. A digital photo usually contains much information in its metadata. Once published online, a photo could disclose much more information beyond what is visually depicted in the photo and what the owner expects to share. The metadata contained in digital photos could pose significant privacy threats to their owners. Our work aims to raise public awareness of privacy risks resulting from sharing photos online and subsequent photo handling conducted by contemporary media sites. To this end, we investigated the prevalence of metadata information among digital photos and assessed the potential privacy risks arising from the metadata information. We also studied the policies adopted by online media sites on handling the metadata information embedded in the photos they host. We examined nearly 100,000 photos collected from over 600 top-ranked websites in seven categories and found that the photo handling policy adopted by a site largely varies depending on the category of the site. We demonstrated that some trivial looking metadata information suffices to mount real-world attacks against photo owners.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-26362-5_20
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-26362-5_20
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84950326459
SN - 9783319263618
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 427
EP - 447
BT - Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses - 18th International Symposium, RAID 2015, Proceedings
A2 - Bos, Herbert
A2 - Blanc, Gregory
A2 - Monrose, Fabian
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 18th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses, RAID 2015
Y2 - 2 November 2015 through 4 November 2015
ER -