Face/Off: Preventing Privacy Leakage From Photos in Social Networks

The capabilities of modern devices, coupled with the almost ubiquitous availability of Internet connectivity, have resulted in photos being shared online at an unprecedented scale. This is further amplified by the popularity of social networks and the immediacy they offer in content sharing. Existing access control mechanisms are too coarse-grained to handle cases of conflicting interests between the users associated with a photo; stories of embarrassing or inappropriate photos being widely accessible have become quite common. In this paper, we propose to rethink access control when applied to photos, in a way that allows us to effectively prevent unwanted individuals from recognizing users in a photo. The core concept behind our approach is to change the granularity of access control from the level of the photo to that of a user’s personally identifiable information (PII). In this work, we focus on the face as the PII. When another user attempts to access a photo, the system d...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Panagiotis Ilia, Iasonas Polakis, Elias Athanasopoulos, Federico Maggi, Sotiris Ioannidis
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy