Online Attacks on Picture Owner Privacy

Bizhan Alipour Pijani (1) , Abdessamad Imine (1) , Michaël Rusinowitch (1)

1 PESTO - Proof techniques for security protocols

We present an online attribute inference attack by leverag-ing Facebook picture metadata (i) alt-text generated by Facebook to describe picture contents, and (ii) comments containing words and emo-jis posted by other Facebook users. Specifically, we study the correlation of the picture's owner with Facebook generated alt-text and comments used by commenters when reacting to the image. We concentrate on gender attribute that is highly relevant for targeted advertising or privacy breaking. We explore how to launch an online gender inference attack on any Facebook user by handling online newly discovered vocabulary using the retrofitting process to enrich a core vocabulary built during offline training. Our experiments show that even when the user hides most public data (e.g., friend list, attribute, page, group), an attacker can detect user gender with AUC (area under the ROC curve) from 87% to 92%, depending on the picture metadata availability. Moreover, we can detect with high accuracy sequences of words leading to gender disclosure, and accordingly, enable users to derive countermeasures and configure their privacy settings safely.

Mots clés: Social Network; Attribute Privacy; Online Inference Attack

Domaines: Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Bizhan Alipour Pijani, Abdessamad Imine, Michaël Rusinowitch. Online Attacks on Picture Owner Privacy. DEXA 2020 - 31st International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, Sep 2020, Bratislava, Slovakia. pp.33-47, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-59051-2_3⟩. ⟨hal-02988123⟩