The Pin-Bang Theory: Discovering The Pinterest World

Abstract: Pinterest is an image-based online social network, which was launched in the year 2010 and has gained a lot of traction, ever since. Within 3 years, Pinterest has attained 48.7 million unique users. This stupendous growth makes it interesting to study Pinterest, and gives rise to multiple questions about it's users, and content. We characterized Pinterest on the basis of large scale crawls of 3.3 million user profiles, and 58.8 million pins. In particular, we explored various attributes of users, pins, boards, pin sources, and user locations, in detail and performed topical analysis of user generated textual content. The characterization revealed most prominent topics among users and pins, top image sources, and geographical distribution of users on Pinterest. We then investigated this social network from a privacy and security standpoint, and found traces of malware in the form of pin sources. Instances of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakage were also discovered in the form of phone numbers, BBM (Blackberry Messenger) pins, and email addresses. Further, our analysis demonstrated how Pinterest is a potential venue for copyright infringement, by showing that almost half of the images shared on Pinterest go uncredited. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to characterize Pinterest at such a large scale.