Measuring the Availability of Images Posted on Social Media Sites

The amount of data stored in social media sites is humongous. It has very large in numbers and very diverse in variety. Researchers have already started using this information in various information security applications such as censorship resistance. When image data from social media sites are used in computational applications for hiding data or obfuscating data, it is important to retrieve the particular data used in the encoding process to retrieve the original data. Therefore, the availability of the image data is an important concern. In this paper, we investigated the availabilities of the images on Flickr. We examined nearly one million images hosted on Flickr and measured their availability in a two year period. We used the EXIF parameters normally generated by the cameras to further categorize the availabilities.