Privacy Intelligence: A Survey on Image Privacy in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Image sharing on online social networks (OSNs) has become an indispensable part of daily social activities, but it has also increased the risk of privacy invasion. An online image can reveal various types of sensitive information, prompting the public to rethink individual privacy needs in OSN image sharing critically. However, the interaction of images and OSN makes the privacy issues significantly complicated. The current real-world solutions for privacy management fail to provide adequate personalized, accurate, and flexible privacy protection. Constructing a more intelligent environment for privacy-friendly OSN image sharing is urgent in the near future. Meanwhile, given the dynamics in both users’ privacy needs and OSN context, a comprehensive understanding of OSN image privacy throughout the entire sharing process is preferable to any views from a single side, dimension, or level. To fill this gap, we contribute a survey of “privacy intelligence” that targets modern privacy issues in dynamic OSN image sharing from a user-centric perspective. Specifically, we present the important properties and a taxonomy of OSN image privacy, along with a high-level privacy analysis framework based on the lifecycle of OSN image sharing. The framework consists of three stages with different principles of privacy by design. At each stage, we identify typical user behaviors in OSN image sharing and their associated privacy issues. Then a systematic review of representative intelligent solutions to those privacy issues is conducted, also in a stage-based manner. The analysis results in an intelligent “privacy firewall” for closed-loop privacy management. Challenges and future directions in this area are also discussed.