How to Manage Privacy in Photos after Publication

Abstract

Photos and videos once published may stay available for people to view it unless they are deleted by the publisher of the photograph. If the content is downloaded and uploaded by others then they lose all the privacy settings once afforded by the publisher of the photograph or video via social media settings. This means that they could be modified or in some cases misused by others. Photos also contain tacit information, which cannot be completely interpreted at the time of their publication. Sensitive information may be revealed to others as the information is coded as tacit information. Tacit information allows different interpretations and creates difficulty in understanding loss of privacy. Free flow and availability of tacit information embedded in a photograph could have serious privacy problems. Our solution discussed in this paper illuminates the difficulty of managing privacy due the tacit information embedded in a photo. It also provides an offline solution for the photograph such that it cannot be modified or altered and gets automatically deleted over a period of time. By extending the Exif data of a photograph by incorporating an in-built feature of automatic deletion, and the access to an image by scrambling the image via adding a hash value. Only a customized application can unscramble the image therefore making it available. This intends to provide a novel offline solution to manage the availability of the image post publication.