Imago Obscura: An Image Privacy AI Co-pilot to Enable Identification and Mitigation of Risks

TL;DR

Imago Obscura is an AI-powered tool that helps users identify and mitigate privacy risks in images before sharing, improving awareness and decision-making through tailored obfuscation techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces Imago Obscura, a novel AI co-pilot system that guides users in understanding and reducing image privacy risks with context-aware recommendations.

Findings

Enhanced user awareness of privacy risks

Improved ability to apply obfuscation techniques

More informed image sharing decisions

Abstract

Users often struggle to navigate the privacy / publicity boundary in sharing images online: they may lack awareness of image privacy risks and/or the ability to apply effective mitigation strategies. To address this challenge, we introduce and evaluate Imago Obscura, an AI-powered, image-editing copilot that enables users to identify and mitigate privacy risks with images they intend to share. Driven by design requirements from a formative user study with 7 image-editing experts, Imago Obscura enables users to articulate their image-sharing intent and privacy concerns. The system uses these inputs to surface contextually pertinent privacy risks, and then recommends and facilitates application of a suite of obfuscation techniques found to be effective in prior literature -- e.g., inpainting, blurring, and generative content replacement. We evaluated Imago Obscura with 15 end-users in a lab study and found that it greatly improved users' awareness of image privacy risks and their ability to address those risks, allowing them to make more informed sharing decisions.