Hide My Face: The Future of Privacy

Preface: Hide My Face is an app available for free download on the iOS App Store. The app gives users transparency into the hidden metadata attached to their photos. Users can delete metadata and also automatically hide any detected faces.

Premise: The development of this app was sparked by my personal experience as an average consumer of social media who is concerned about the state of privacy in today’s society.

There is an excessive disregard for privacy in the technology industry today and I think we users should be empowered to take action. First, why does privacy matter?

Why privacy?

I find it difficult to articulate the need for privacy as it is something I often take for granted — an unspoken right that I stipulate on a daily basis. I expect for another person to enter my home only with prior consent, I expect to be able to think without the presence of an observer, I expect that no person has access to something as private as my medical records. So I turn to the definition: “the state or condition of being free from being observed.” The intuitive explanation behind why this “state or condition” is important is simply because that natural state of being is innate and one in which we spend most of our time. Therefore, no one in good faith should interfere with that right.

Privacy catastrophes:

A few recent instances of abuse caught my attention:

1. Facial recognition surveillance at peaceful BLM protests as well as those in Hong Kong resulted in law enforcement identifying and arresting protesters — a clear violation of the right to free speech.
2. Another example includes Clearview AI, a company that scraped the web for all images to generate profiles for any person with an online presence. Their facial recognition tool can identify people in an image within seconds on just a mobile phone. This demonstrates a violation of informed consent. By posting an image on Facebook, I didn’t give permission to Clearview to store and use it.
3. China’s social crediting system operates via facial recognition to assign each citizen a score based on their public behavior. Activities including misbehaving on a train or even jaywalking result in demerits. This literal dystopia is almost identical to the episode “Nosedive” from the Netflix series Black Mirror. The implications of such mass surveillance and corresponding punishments for non-conforming behavior could prove disastrous for human rights.

and there are so many more instances of abuse, blunders (hacks), etc.

So, how might we mitigate *some* of these privacy issues?

A couple of key points here: educate users, develop user-friendly tools, and incorporate privacy into product design.

1. Education is a simple yet crucial step towards affecting change. Informing consumers about their data and what they share with others will give them the power to make informed decisions.
2. A second important step is providing consumers with the tools they need to make these decisions. Recent examples of this include the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Apple’s IDFA which allows for users to opt-out of personal data collection at will.
3. Third, the onus should not be upon the consumer to ensure their data is being properly handled. Products should be designed to be human-centric, caring about users’ privacy by implementing ideas like informed consent, opt-in, and data collection and usage transparency.

Ideally, this means users are educated about the data they generate and are savvy about the tools available to manage their data. Hence, there would be a plethora of user-friendly tools and access controls developed which allow for these preferences to be adjusted. Furthermore, companies would implement privacy as a chief consideration during their product design to ensure a bonafide relationship with their users.

Outlook

I developed Hide My Face as a tool to share images responsibly and as an educational resource to show users the data that they generate. I hope to see an industry that shifts towards valuing its consumers and their privacy via this approach of developing new tools and implementing responsible design.

That’s my spiel.

I invite you to offer your experiences, thoughts and comments if this topic resonates with you or merely piqued your interests.

Check out the `Hide My Face` iOS app: hidemyface.xyz

Check out my Github to see how the app was developed: github.com/Ishil-Puri/hidemyface