IIITH-TM18004 PRIVACY AND SECURITY ON ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA PROJECTS

Introduction Our project deals with the social media website Gab, which rose to prominence recently when Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers, was found to be an active user of the social media website. But, what is Gab? Gab is basically a Twitter clone, and just like Twitter, it allows users to read and write multimedia messages of up to 300 characters, called "gabs". The major difference in the two websites is the guidelines governing them. Unlike Twitter, Gab has a small set of rules: No threats/terrorism, No illegal pornography, Legal pornography is allowed(but must be marked NSFW), and No doxxing Due to Gab's very limited set of rules rules (along with poor enforcement), it has become a breeding ground for conservative, libertarian, nationalists and populist internet users. Data Using Gab's API, we crawled the website and collected a total of 18562 gabs, around 10000 user profiles, 600 trending topics and 7500 trendi...

Motivation It is no secret that every image you post online contains locations information such as geotags, metadata , and device information. Tech-savvy users disable location tracking on their devices, remove metadata, and disable geotags before uploading images to protect their privacy. But it turns out that recent advancements in Deep Learning have gone one step further. It is now possible for a software to figure out your location given just the pixels in your image. Keeping this in mind, we asked the question, “What can users do now to protect themselves?” The answer was our project “UnLocate It”. Mission Create a tool that 1. Modifies your image AND 2. Fools these softwares WITH minimal loss in image quality The Pipeline Given an image, our software modifies the image in subtle ways, which are not visible to the human eye but completely baffle computers. What’s more, our neural network is fast and lightweight, an we envisage tha...

Motivation The course, as the name suggests, delves into the importance of privacy while using online social media. In the current age where people from all over the world can access the information we put out in our online profiles at the click of a button, it is important to maintain some sense of privacy in our social activity. Recently we have even seen some of the leading players in this market, like Facebook and Google, getting grilled by the Congress regarding some of their privacy policies and data handling (the word grilled is used loosely of course).   N ow this brings us to our topic statement “Comparative study on effect of anonymity and ephemerality in online social media”. We all hear about the importance of finding a balance between privacy/security and usability in a lot of software products. We wanted to study how privacy affects the usability of online social media platforms. We wanted to choose platforms which had varying levels of anony...