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Personal data garnered from various sensors are often offloaded by applications to the cloud for analytics. This leads to a potential risk of disclosing private user information. We observe that the analytics run on the cloud are often limited to a machine learning model such as predicting a user’s activity using an activity classifier. We present Olympus, a privacy framework that limits the risk of disclosing private user information by obfuscating sensor data while minimally affecting the functionality the data are intended for. Olympus achieves privacy by designing a utility aware obfuscation mechanism, where privacy and utility requirements are modeled as adversarial networks. By rigorous and comprehensive evaluation on a real world app and on benchmark datasets, we show that Olympus successfully limits the disclosure of private information without significantly affecting functionality of the application.

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Abstract. Category based image search, where the goal is to retrieve images of a specific category from a large database, is becoming increasingly popular. In such a setting, the query is often a classifier. However, the complexity of the classifiers (often SVMs) used for this purpose hinders the use of such a solution in practice. Problem becomes paramount when the database is huge and/or the dimensionality of the feature representation is also very large. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel method which decomposes the query classifier into set of known eigen queries. We use their precomputed results (or scores) for computing the ranked list corresponding to novel queries. We also propose an approximate algorithm which accesses only a fraction of the data to perform fast retrieval. Experiments on various datasets show that our method reports high accuracy and efficiency. Apart from retrieval, the proposed method can also be used to discover interesting new concepts from the given dataset.

The increasing popularity of wearable devices that continuously capture video, and the prevalence of third-party applications that utilize these feeds have resulted in a new threat to privacy. In many situations, sensitive objects/regions are maliciously (or accidentally) captured in a video frame by third-party applications. However, current solutions do not allow users to specify and enforce fine grained access control over video feeds.In this paper, we describe MarkIt, a computer vision based privacy marker framework, that allows users to specify and enforce fine grained access control over video feeds. We present two example privacy marker systems -PrivateEye and WaveOff. We conclude with a discussion of the computer vision, privacy and systems challenges in building a comprehensive system for fine grained access control over video feeds.