An Extended Control Framework for Privacy-Preserving Photo Sharing across Different Social Networks

Photo sharing across different social networks has become one of the most popular social activities in our daily life. However, users lost the control totally once they upload their photos to the current social network. In this paper, we propose the design, implementation and evaluation of PrivacyJPEG, a framework to preserve users’ privacy on their uploaded photos, especially when these photos are forwarded to other social networks. PrivacyJPEG acts as a third-party plugin to existing photo sharing-supported social networks, it enables: 1) to encrypt several privacy areas of photos and bind the access control polices before users uploading their photos, 2) each user’s privacy policy could restrain the following users on a dissemination chain, 3) any privacy areas on the photos could be hidden away from unwanted viewers even across different social networks. Besides, PrivacyJPEG presents a carefully designed embedding method, which binds the policies to the uploaded JPEG file without disturbing their displays. We implement a prototype of PrivacyJPEG, design and perform a set of useful real life experiments. The evaluation results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of PrivacyJPEG.