Volunteers sign-up is now available for the 2011 Open Video Conference. Volunteering at OVC gets you free admission to the conference, an Open Video Alliance t-shirt and our sincerest appreciation. We will also, of course, feed you.
Sign-up will be open through the date of the conference (Sept 10-12) but we will be planning on having at least one orientation in late August. You’ll be able to meet your fellow volunteers and learn more about what the tasks will be day to day. Sign up today!
With cameras now so widespread, and image-sharing so routine, it is surprising how little public discussion there is about visual privacy and anonymity. Everyone is discussing and designing for privacy of personal data, but almost no one is considering the right to control personal images in a socially-networked age or to be anonymous in a video-mediated world.
Imagine a landscape where companies are able to commercially harvest, identify and trade images of a person’s face as easily as they share emails and phone numbers. While it is technically illegal in some jurisdictions (such as the EU) to hold databases of such images and data, it is highly likely that without proactive policymaking, legislative loopholes will be exploited where they exist. So far, policy discussions around visual privacy have largely centred on public concerns about surveillance cameras and individual liberties. And now, with automatic face-detection and recognition software being incorporated into consumer cameras, mobile apps and social media platforms, the potential for identification of activists and others - including victims, witnesses and survivors of human rights abuses - is growing.
Furthermore, services increasingly store users’ personal and other data in the digital cloud. Cloud data is processed and handled across multiple jurisdictions, creating potential inconsistencies and conflicts in how users and their data are protected. More worryingly, cloud storage renders data vulnerable to multiple attacks and data theft by any number of malicious hackers. Hostile governments, in particular, can use photo and video data – particularly that linked with social networking data – to identify, track and target activists within their countries.
Beyond that, in an increasingly video-mediated world, the right to visual anonymity – within an understanding of how the right to freedom of speech is often facilitated by the ability to be anonymous, has not yet been fully articulated or developed.
Professor Helen Nissenbaum
This session, led by Helen Nissenbaum, Professor at the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communications, and Sam Gregory, Program Director at WITNESS, will work towards a greater understanding of what we might mean by visual privacy and visual anonymity, and how this relates to other conceptions of privacy and anonymity. It will address the opportunities identified by commercial providers who are beginning to use facial recognition and identification within social network products, and create a dialogue around key issues. It will also consider what tools and technologies could be incorporated into core web and mobile functionality to enable both human rights activists and general users to exercise greater control over visual privacy and anonymity. This includes building “visual privacy” checks (including masking data encoded into images, such as location, time, type of camera, etc.) as well as standard privacy checks into product design, development and marketing workflows, drawing on risk scenarios outlined through human rights impact assessments.
The SecureSmartCam project, a collaboration of WITNESS and the Guardian Project, aims to design and develop a new type of smartphone camera app that respects the visual privacy, anonymity and consent of the subjects they photograph or record. It’s designed for capturing images in politically sensitive situations where preserving the anonymity of subjects is a serious consideration.
The SecureSmartCam project recently crossed a major milestone with the beta release of the ObscuraCam app for Android, which automatically pixelates the faces of subjects captured by the app.
The SecureSmartCam project was developed in part at OVC 2010, and in association with WITNESS, the project will be returning to this year’s Open Video Conference.
We sat down with Bryan Nunez, Technology Manager at WITNESS, to discuss the project.
Q. What is the plan for getting this technology deployed?
We’ve been very open and transparent about the development of the technology from the outset of the project. We’re using open source tools such as Android, OpenCV, and using GitHub to publicly manage the code. So all the source code and builds have been available to the public.
In addition to GitHub we’re also distributing the app via the Android Market. We plan to distribute the app to our human rights partners through trainings as well.
Q. How does the SecureSmartCam idea fit in with other things happening at Witness?
SecureSmartCam is part of larger initiative we’ve started called, “Cameras Everywhere.” Essentially we recognize that video is becoming more accessible and more ubiquitous both in terms of technology and distribution channels. This flood of video represents more opportunities to expose human rights abuse, but as more people
post videos online, there’s also more potential that people might be endangered if they’re not aware of the possible risks.
We hope to enable an environment where people can use video for human rights in a safer and more effective way, by working with technology developers and providers as well building tools such as the SSC.
Bryan Nunez, WITNESS (CC Image courtesy of Joichi Ito)
Although WITNESS and the Guardian Project have been talking about collaborating for awhile now, we really kicked off our formal collaboration at the 2010 OVC. Last year’s conference was made up of three parts, the first being a discussion of the problems and risks of having human rights video online, the second a brainstorming workshop around how to address these issues, and finally a hack day in which we actually sat down and built a rough prototype of a facial recognition app on an Android phone.
This year we hope to showcase the work that’s been done over the past year. The risks we discussed last year haven’t gone away and have only been highlighted further with the videos that have come out of the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. We’d like to continue this discussion and re-check our assumptions as well as get feedback from the OVC community that will help us as we continue development.
Q. What do you hope to accomplish?
We hope we’ll have made some significant progress on the app and that we’ll be able to have people test it out. We’d also like to continue the dialog we started at the 2010 OVC.
Q. What are some challenges you’re expecting?
Right now the ObscuraCam only works on stills. Video may be difficult, but we’re optimistic.
Q. What are the ultimate wishes for this project? Where would you like to see it in
two years time?
Ultimately we hope that the work we do with the SecureSmartCam project is adopted by more people, that the concepts of visual privacy, informed consent, and basic human rights ideals are good for everyone and that this thinking finds its way into the design of technologies beyond SSC.
Bryan has told us that development of the next version of ObscuraCam is moving along and will be more robust with plans to feature options such as video support. The next version is tentatively entitled “InformaCam.”
