Privacy Lab

PIs Apu Kapadia and David Crandall at IU, and Denise Anthony at Dartmouth College, have received a $1.2M collaborative NSF award (IU Share: $800K) to study privacy in the context of wearable cameras over the next four years. The ubiquity of cameras, both traditional and wearable, will soon create a new era of visual sensing applications, raising significant implications for individuals and society, both beneficial and hazardous. This research couples a sociological understanding of privacy with an investigation of technical mechanisms to address these needs. Issues such as context (e.g., capturing images for public use may be okay at a public event, but not in the home) and content (are individuals recognizable?) will be explored both on technical and sociological fronts: What can we determine about images, what does this mean in terms of privacy risk, and how can systems protect against risk to privacy? 

Read more about this grant, and our project. Here is a 90-second video!

Researchers have shown how ‘network alignment’ techniques can be used to map nodes from a reference graph into an anonymized social-network graph. These algorithms, however, are often sensitive to larger network sizes, the number of seeds, and noise~— which may be added to preserve privacy. We propose a divide-and-conquer approach to strengthen the power of such algorithms. Our approach partitions the networks into ‘communities’ and performs a two-stage mapping: first at the community level, and then for the entire network. Through extensive simulation on real-world social network datasets, we show how such community-aware network alignment improves de-anonymization performance under high levels of noise, large network sizes, and a low number of seeds. Read more in our paper, which will be presented at ACM CCS 2014.

PIs Kapadia and Crandall have received a 2014 Google Research Award for their research on privacy  in the context of ‘lifelogging’ wearable cameras. We expect that these wearable cameras (see the Narrative Clip and the Autographer in addition to Google Glass) will become commonplace within the next few years, regularly capturing photos to record a first-person perspective of the wearer’s life.  The goal of this project is to investigate and build automatic algorithms to organize images from lifelogging cameras, using a combination of computer vision and analysis of sensor data (like GPS, WiFi, accelerometers, etc.), thus empowering users to efficiently manage and share these images in a way that protects their privacy.  As a first step, we proposed PlaceAvoider, an approach for recognizing (and avoiding) sensitive spaces within images. Read an article about this work by the MIT Technology Review. Read more about our project here.

Indiana University hosted the interactive and thought-provoking PETools workshop, chaired by Prof. Apu Kapadia and held in conjunction with PETS 2013. The goal of this workshop was to discuss the design of privacy tools aimed at real-world deployments. This workshop brought together privacy practitioners and researchers with the aim to spark dialog and collaboration between these communities. We thank the authors and attendees for a successful workshop! Please check out the program (with links to the abstracts)!

Prof. Apu Kapadia’s award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is titled CAREER: Sensible Privacy: Pragmatic Privacy Controls in an Era of Sensor-Enabled Computing. From the press release: Kapadia will receive $550,887 over the next five years to advance his work in security and privacy in pervasive and mobile computing. Kapadia’s grant will allow him to pursue development of reactive privacy mechanisms that he said could have a profound and positive societal impact by not only helping people control their privacy, but also potentially increasing their participation in sensor-enabled computing. “People need only care about the subset of data and usage scenarios that have the potential to violate their privacy, and this reduces the amount of data to which they must regulate access,” he said. “And people make better decisions concerning such access when these decisions are made in a context where they know how their data is being used.”

We introduce PlaceRaider, a proof-of-concept mobile malware that exploits a smartphone’s camera and onboard sensors to reconstruct rich, 3D models of the victim’s indoor space using only opportunistically taken photos. Attackers can use these models to engage in remote reconnaissance and virtual theft of the victims’ environment. We substantiate this threat through human subject studies. Our paper was presented at the 20th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2013. For more details, see the PlaceRaider project page.

Profs. David Crandall and Apu Kapadia have been awarded  $50K of seed funding through the Faculty Research Support Program (FRSP) for their project titled Vision for Privacy: Privacy-aware Crowd Sensing using Opportunistic Imagery. A variety of powerful and potentially transformative `visual social sensing’ applications could be created by aggregating together data from cameras and sensors on smartphones and emerging technologies such as augmented reality glasses (e.g., by Google Project Glass). These applications, however,  raise major privacy concerns because of the large amount of potentially private data that could be captured. This project investigates techniques to provide guarantees on privacy in the context of such applications. For more details, see our project page.