Personal rights management - Taming camera-phones for individual privacy enforcement

Abstract

With ubiquitous use of digital camera devices, especially in mobile phones, privacy is no longer threatened by governments and companies only. The new technology creates a new threat by ordinary people, who could take and distribute pictures of an individual with no risk and little cost in any situation in public or private spaces. Fast distribution via web based photo albums, online communities and web pages expose an individual's private life to the public. Social and legal measures are increasingly taken to deal with this problem, but they are hard to enforce in practice. In this paper, we proposed a model for privacy infrastructures aiming for the distribution channel such that as soon as the picture is publicly available, the exposed individual has a chance to find it and take proper action in the first place. The implementation issues of the proposed protocol are discussed. Digital rights management techniques are applied in our proposed infrastructure, and data identification techniques such as digital watermarking and robust perceptual hashing are proposed to enhance the distributed content identification. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.