SnapMe if you can: privacy threats of other peoples' geo-tagged media and what we can do about it

  • Authors:

  • Benjamin Henne;Christian Szongott;Matthew Smith

  • Affiliations:

  • Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany;Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany;Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the sixth ACM conference on Security and privacy in wireless and mobile networks
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The amount of media uploaded to the Web is still rapidly expanding. The ease-of-use of modern smartphones in combination with the proliferation of high-speed mobile networks facilitates a culture of spontaneous and often carefree sharing of user-generated content, especially photos and videos. An increasing number of modern devices are capable of embedding location information and other metadata into created content. However, currently there is not much user awareness of possible privacy consequences of such data. While in most cases users upload their own media consciously, the flood of media uploaded by others is so huge that it is almost impossible for users to stay aware of all media that might be relevant to them. Current social network services and photo-sharing sites mainly focus on the privacy of users' own media in terms of access control, but offer few possibilities to deal with privacy implications created by other users' actions. We conducted an online survey with 414 participants. The results show that users would like to get more information about media shared by others. Based on an analysis of prevalent sharing services like Flickr, Facebook, or Google+ and an analysis of metadata of three different sets of crawled photos, we discuss privacy implications and potentials of the emerging trend of (geo-)tagged media. Finally, we present a novel concept on how location information can actually help users to control the flood of potentially infringing or interesting media.