From understanding to controlling privacy against automatic person identification

Growth of the internet and social media has spurred the sharing and dissemination of personal data at large scale. At the same time, recent developments in computer vision has enabled unseen effectiveness and efficiency in automated recognition. It is clear that visual data contains private information that can be mined, yet the privacy implications of sharing such data have been less studied in computer vision community. In the talk, I will present some key results from our study of the implications of the development of computer vision on the identifiability in social media, and an analysis of existing and new anonymisation techniques. In particular, we show that adversarial image perturbations (AIP) introduce human invisible perturbations on the input image that effectively misleads a recogniser. They are far more aesthetic and effective compared to e.g. face blurring. The core limitation, however, is that AIPs are usually generated against specific target recogniser(s), and it is hard to guarantee the performance against uncertain, potentially adaptive recognisers. As a first step towards dealing with the uncertainty, we have introduced a game theoretical framework to obtain the user’s privacy guarantee independent of the randomly chosen recogniser (within some fixed set).