The Geo-Privacy Bonus of Popular Photo Enhancements

Jaeyoung Choi, Martha Larson, Xinchao Li, Kevin Li, Gerald Friedland, Alan Hanjalic

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Today's geo-location estimation approaches are able to infer the location of a target image using its visual content alone. These approaches typically exploit visual matching techniques, applied to a large collection of background images with known geo-locations. Users who are unaware that visual analysis and retrieval approaches can compromise their geo-privacy, unwittingly open themselves to risks of crime or other unintended consequences. This paper lays the groundwork for a new approach to geo-privacy of social images: Instead of requiring a change of user behavior, we start by investigating users' existing photo-sharing practices. We carry out a series of experiments using a large collection of social images (8.5M) to systematically analyze how photo editing practices impact the performance of geo-location estimation. We find that standard image enhancements, including filters and cropping, already serve as natural geo-privacy protectors. In our experiments, up to 19% of images whose location would otherwise be automatically predictable were unlocalizeable after enhancement. We conclude that it would be wrong to assume that geo-visual privacy is a lost cause in today's world of rapidly maturing machine learning. Instead, protecting users against the unwanted effects of pixel-based inference is a viable research field. A starting point is understanding the geo-privacy bonus of already established user behavior.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM
Pages84-92
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-4701-3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
EventICMR 2017: ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval - Bucharest, Romania
Duration: 6 Jun 20179 Jun 2017
http://www.icmr2017.ro/

Conference

ConferenceICMR 2017
Country/TerritoryRomania
CityBucharest
Period6/06/179/06/17
Internet address

Keywords

  • geo-privacy
  • geo-location estimation
  • usable privacy for multimedia retrieval

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