A Privacy-Preserving System Design for Digital Presence Protection

A person’s privacy has become a growing concern, given the nature of an expansive reliance on real-time video activities with video capture, stream, and storage. This paper presents an innovative system design based on a privacy-preserving model. The proposed system design is implemented by employing an enhanced capability that overcomes today’s single parameter-based access control protection mechanism for digital privacy preservation. The enhanced capability combines multiple access control parameters: facial expression, resource, environment, location, and time. The proposed system design demonstrated that a person’s facial expressions combined with a set of access control rules can achieve a person’s privacy-preserving preferences. The findings resulted in different facial expressions successfully triggering a person’s face to be blurred and a person’s privacy when using a real-time video conferencing service captured from a webcam or virtual webcam. A comparison analysis of capabilities between existing designs and the proposed system design shows enhancement of the capabilities of the proposed system. A series of experiments exercising the enhanced, real-time multi-parameter-based system was shown as a viable path forward for preserving a person’s privacy while using a webcam or virtual webcam to capture, stream, and store videos.