Tag you’re it: a look at privacy issues in social media sharing

Many social networking websites have the ability to share multimedia such as images, audio and videos with other users. The uploader typically has the ability to tag the photo or video with the names of the users that are in the multimedia. However, once a user has been tagged their profile is mapped immediately to the multimedia. Should a tagged user feel their privacy has been infringed upon, the social network does not provide the tagged user with much to solve the infringement of that user's privacy before exposure. What makes matters worse is that even though social networking websites provide users with the ability to change certain privacy settings, most users do not alter the default settings. In addition to privacy issues found on the user’s side, it can also be seen that through third party APIs certain social networks websites (namely Facebook) give far more information (user likes, addresses, images, etc.) to application developers than is necessary to run their applications. The shared information (especially user interests and addresses) can then be leveraged to achieve tasks outside of the scope of the application (such as building databases that can be sold to marketing firms). However, Facebook cannot directly solve this problem by restraining access, because this will effectively break many applications, making it a persistent problem. Although social networks are tied with problems like these, the limited amount of computational resources to address them will take time to solve them. This paper outlines these social network sharing privacy issues and provides possible solutions to these privacy issues that remain cognizant of resource limitations and show that through incremental steps these problems can be solved sooner rather than later.