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You are what emojis say about your pictures: language-independent gender inference attack on Facebook

Published: 30 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The picture owner's gender has a strong influence on individuals' emotional reactions to the picture. In this study, we investigate gender inference attacks on their owners from pictures meta-data composed of: (i) alt-texts generated by Facebook to describe the content of pictures, and (ii) Emojis/Emoticons posted by friends, friends of friends or regular users as a reaction to the picture. Specifically, we study the correlation of picture owner gender with alt-text, and Emojis/Emoticons used by commenters when reacting to these pictures. We leverage this image sharing and reaction mode of Facebook users to derive an efficient and accurate technique for user gender inference. We show that such a privacy attack often succeeds even when other information than pictures published by their owners is either hidden or unavailable.

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  • (2023)Attribute Inference Attacks in Online Multiplayer Video Games: A Case Study on DOTA2Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy10.1145/3577923.3583653(27-38)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Privacy Risk Analysis of Online Social NetworksundefinedOnline publication date: 7-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Divide-and-Learn: A Random Indexing Approach to Attribute Inference Attacks in Online Social NetworksData and Applications Security and Privacy XXXV10.1007/978-3-030-81242-3_20(338-354)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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SAC '20: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 2020
2348 pages
ISBN:9781450368667
DOI:10.1145/3341105
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 30 March 2020

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Author Tags

  1. emojis
  2. gender inference
  3. inference attack
  4. picture
  5. privacy
  6. social network

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SAC '20
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SAC '20: The 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 30 - April 3, 2020
Brno, Czech Republic

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Attribute Inference Attacks in Online Multiplayer Video Games: A Case Study on DOTA2Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy10.1145/3577923.3583653(27-38)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Privacy Risk Analysis of Online Social NetworksundefinedOnline publication date: 7-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Divide-and-Learn: A Random Indexing Approach to Attribute Inference Attacks in Online Social NetworksData and Applications Security and Privacy XXXV10.1007/978-3-030-81242-3_20(338-354)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Inferring attributes with picture metadata embeddingsACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review10.1145/3412816.341281920:2(36-45)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2020

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