Hidden Privacy Risks in Sharing Pictures on Social Media

Shared pictures, videos and more constitute as shared media in today's world of social networks. Each piece of media shared has hidden privacy violations stored in their metadata. Over the past two decades, social media sites, and shared media on them, have grown exponentially. People are sharing more data, and with more people, such unknowing users easily become the victims of numerous types of privacy attacks. By creating a GUI based metadata reader and editor, much of this security risk can be alleviated for common users. By bringing the capability to view and change metadata to different platforms, the true risk, hidden in all shared media, can be brought outright and mitigated. Much of the important data that can be exposed deals with geotags for locations, as well as camera identification numbers, and time stamps. In this work, we discuss the importance of having control of this type of information and share a model application that can be used to help resolve privacy breaches of this type.