According to media licensing experts, internet users upload between four and fifteen billion photos a day to various social media sites. And those social media sites are adept at associating and storing in depth information about the people who appear in each and every one of those photos.  As anyone who has seen a prompt asking if you want to share a memory from a decade ago, most of those photos, and the data associated with them, sit on servers forever.

Recent research suggests that social media companies are doing more than just storing such images – they’re using them to find out more about you, your friends, and what you do in your daily life, and keep that information with each pic. Up to 500 different labels might get attached to that vacation photo you just uploaded, indicating where and when it was taken and who is in it.

A pair of UW computer science researchers have been studying the methods that companies like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram use to mine information about you from the images you post, and came to WORT studios to tell us what they learned.

Kassem Fawaz is the Associate Chair for Research at the University of Wisconsin College of Engineering and faculty lead for WI-PI, the Wisconsin Privacy and Security Group.  Jack West is an Engineering PhD candidate and WI-PI member.

 

Photo courtesy of Dr. Kassem Fawaz.

Web posting by Nicholas Wootton

 

 

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