CamForensics: Understanding Visual Privacy Leaks in the Wild

Abstract

Many mobile apps, including augmented-reality games, bar-code readers, and document scanners, digitize information from the physical world by applying computer-vision algorithms to live camera data. However, because camera permissions for existing mobile operating systems are coarse (i.e., an app may access a camera’s entire view or none of it), users are vulnerable to visual privacy leaks. An app violates visual privacy if it extracts information from camera data in unexpected ways. For example, a user might be surprised to find that an augmented-reality makeup app extracts text from the camera’s view in addition to detecting faces. This paper presents results from the first large-scale study of visual privacy leaks in the wild. We build CamForensics to identify the kind of information that apps extract from camera data. Our extensive user surveys determine what kind of information users expected an app to extract. Finally, our results show that camera apps frequently defy users’ expectations based on their descriptions.