Videosurveillance and privacy: covering the two sides of the mirror with DRM

Abstract

Privacy and security have always been key concerns for individuals. They have also been closely related concepts: in order to increase their perception of security, people sacrifice a part of their privacy by accepting to be surveilled by others. The tradeoff between both is usually reasonable and commonly accepted; however, the case of videosurveillance systems has been particularly controversial since their inception, as their benefits are not perceived to compensate for the privacy loss in many cases. The situation has become even worse during the last years with the massive deployment of these systems, which often do not provide satisfactory guarantees for the citizens. This paper proposes a DRM-based framework for videosurveillance to achieve a better balance between both concepts: it protects privacy of the surveilled individuals, whilst giving support to efficient automated surveillance.