A new generation of wearable devices (such as Google Glass and the Narrative Clip) will soon make ‘first-person’ cameras nearly ubiquitous, capturing vast amounts of imagery without deliberate human action. ‘Lifelogging’ devices and applications will record and share images from people’s daily lives with their social networks.
We introduce PlaceAvoider, a technique for owners of first-person cameras to ‘blacklist’ sensitive spaces (like bathrooms and bedrooms). PlaceAvoider recognizes images captured in these spaces and flags them for review before the images are made available to applications. PlaceAvoider performs novel image analysis using both fine-grained image features (like specific objects) and coarse-grained, scene-level features (like colors and textures) to classify where a photo was taken.
Our paper will appear at NDSS 2014. Read more about our ‘Vision for Privacy‘ project.