Where to be wary: The impact of widespread photo-taking and image enhancement practices on users' geo-privacy
Jaeyoung Choi, Martha Larson, Xinchao Li, Gerald Friedland, Alan, Hanjalic

TL;DR
This paper investigates how common photo-taking and editing practices can unintentionally protect users' geo-privacy by hindering geo-location estimation, suggesting a new approach that leverages existing user behaviors.
Contribution
It demonstrates that widespread user practices can naturally protect geo-privacy and provides a systematic analysis of how these practices impact geo-location inference.
Findings
Widespread photo practices can protect over 50% of images from geo-location.
Existing user behaviors can be harnessed for geo-privacy protection.
Geo-privacy protection can be achieved without changing user habits.
Abstract
Today's geo-location estimation approaches are able to infer the location of a target image using its visual content alone. These approaches exploit visual matching techniques, applied to a large collection of background images with known geo-locations. Users who are unaware that visual retrieval approaches can compromise their geo-privacy, unwittingly open themselves to risks of crime or other unintended consequences. Private photo sharing is not able to protect users effectively, since its inconvenience is a barrier to consistent use, and photos can still fall into the wrong hands if they are re-shared. This paper lays the groundwork for a new approach to geo-privacy of social images: Instead of requiring a complete change of user behavior, we investigate the protection potential latent in users existing practices. We carry out a series of retrieval experiments using a large…
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Taxonomy
TopicsFace recognition and analysis · Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques · Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
