Decaying Photos for Enhanced Privacy: User Perceptions Towards Temporal Redactions and 'Trusted' Platforms

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DOI

With the rising popularity of photo sharing in online social media, interpersonal privacy violations, where one person violates the privacy of another, have become an increasing concern. Although applying image obfuscations has been a useful tool for improving privacy when sharing photos, prior studies have found these obfuscation techniques adversely affect viewers’ satisfaction. In the context of ephemeral (or disappearing) photos, which have been popularized by apps such as Snapchat, people have found workarounds to save these photos before deletion. We conducted an online experiment (N=385) to evaluate people’s sharing preferences with two proposed temporal redactions in different contexts (by varying the photo content and the type of recipient). We also studied people’s sharing behaviors under different levels of assurance provided by the viewer’s platform (i.e., whether the receiver’s platform is secured using trusted hardware). Our findings suggest that although people are comfortable with existing methods, the proposed temporal redaction mechanisms are often preferred. We also found no difference in participants’ sharing behaviors for trusted and non-trusted viewing platforms, suggesting more efforts are needed to convey the benefits of trusted hardware to users.