My Privacy My Decision: Control of Photo Sharing on Online Social Networks

Photo sharing is an attractive feature which popularizes online social networks (OSNs). Unfortunately, it may leak users’ privacy if they are allowed to post, comment, and tag a photo freely. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue and study the scenario when a user shares a photo containing individuals other than himself/herself (termed co-photo for short). To prevent possible privacy leakage of a photo, we design a mechanism to enable each individual in a photo be aware of the posting activity and participate in the decision making on the photo posting. For this purpose, we need an efficient facial recognition (FR) system that can recognize everyone in the photo. However, more demanding privacy setting may limit the number of the photos publicly available to train the FR system. To deal with this dilemma, our mechanism attempts to utilize users’ private photos to design a personalized FR system specifically trained to differentiate possible photo co-owners without leaking their privacy. We also develop a distributed consensus-based method to reduce the computational complexity and protect the private training set. We show that our system is superior to other possible approaches in terms of recognition ratio and efficiency. Our mechanism is implemented as a proof of concept Android application on Facebook’s platform