The current solutions to disclosing privacy in computer-mediated communication are two-fold: either the connection is permitted and an audio-video link is opened providing a full-blown perceptual view on the distant location, or the connection is denied and the distant visitor has no perceptual access to the remote site. We claim that the disclosure of private data is more complex than these simplistic binary solutions. In this article, we present the concept of published observability as a system property to characterize the disclosure of private data. We propose a technical solution as an instantiation of this property using an eigen-space coding for private video data. This technique has been implemented within CoMedi, a mediaspace under development. KEY WORDS privacy, computer mediated communication, mediaspace, eigen-space coding, computer vision
Joëlle Coutaz, James L. Crowley, Franç