Hello all,
I came across a blog post that might interest you all. @techdad did a quick analysis of public images from online black markets (such as Silk Road et al)[2] from 2011-2015, and came to the following conclusion:
"After parsing hundreds of thousands of images, I came across about 37 unique images that were not properly sanitized."[1]
That's surprisingly low -- 0.00037% if one assumes 100k images analyzed. Given the number of high-profile cases [4] where this location information led to arrests, it's not very surprising that some people likely took the time to remove the EXIF data, but I'm curious whether a given website may have stripped the metadata for uploaded images. The images that tested positive are shown on the blog post, and 8/37 were clearly from the same individual.
When mapped out, the location data is primarily in the US (5 locations), along with 1 location in France and Australia.
Incidentally, the full 1.6TB dataset from 2011-2015 is available on the Internet Archive [3], just in case the Hacking Team disclosures haven't used up all your hard drive space. ;-) This data on its own is a rather interesting look into the workings of black markets -- many of which no longer exist. Curious to see what you all think and what analyses you'd like to see from this kind of data.
best, Griffin
[1] http://atechdad.com/Deanonymizing-Darknet-Data/ [2] http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20archives [3] https://archive.org/details/dnmarchives [4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/picture-worth-thousand-words-including...