Revealing the Unseen in Social Networking Sites : Is Your Metadata Protected ?

The increased usage of mobile devices, equipped with digital cameras, has allowed users to take photographs and share them more easily and more quickly than in the past. Everyday thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of photos are uploaded to social networking websites using computers and mobile devices. It has been said that "a picture is worth a thousand words" but now we must consider the additional information contained within these pictures taken with digital devices. This additional information, also known as metadata, can contain information such as the date and time the picture was taken, the make and model of the camera used to take the picture, and geographic location information or geographic metadata. Geographic metadata also provides valuable information such as latitude and longitude coordinates, altitude, and GPS time and date stamps using the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system. This information can be used to pinpoint the exact location where a picture was taken, and it can be used by criminals for their unlawful endeavors. In this paper, we will evaluate whether popular social networking sites are protecting their users' picture metadata by performing an experiment to determine whether this metadata is accessible after it has been downloaded from these social networking websites. Risks associated with privacy and possible solutions, techniques, and tools to remove metadata in photographs uploaded to social networking sites will also be presented.