Abstract
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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Notes
- 1.
By photographer we mean the person who took the photo rather than who works as a professional photographer.
- 2.
“Classified” refers to the classified advertisements sites such as Craigslist.
- 3.
We crawled the site twice and collected over 1,000 photos.
- 4.
A serial number is unique within a camera brand. Combined with camera make and model, a serial number can uniquely identify a camera.
- 5.
Smartphones typically do not store their serial numbers in their photos.
References
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Acknowledgement
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.
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A Ethical Consideration
A Ethical Consideration
In our study, we leveraged several methods to collect photos, including: (1) soliciting “fresh” photos from crowdsourcing workers, (2) crawling photos from Flickr using its API, (3) random Google Image Search, and (4) crawling top websites for limited amounts of photos. Note that our crowdsourcing study has been vetted and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at our institution. During our photo collection, we did not receive any concerns or get warnings from those involved sites and did not interfere with their normal operations. In addition, with the collected photos, we anonymized the metadata information embedded before using them for study. We strictly abide by the copyright licenses if present.
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Xu, H., Wang, H., Stavrou, A. (2015). Privacy Risk Assessment on Online Photos. In: Bos, H., Monrose, F., Blanc, G. (eds) Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses. RAID 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9404. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26362-5_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26362-5_20
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