Enforcing the privacy and the security of multimedia contents

Multimedia oriented search engines have so far been used in very friendly settings where enrichment of knowledge is paramount. This typically benefit to the contents providers, to the users, etc., sometimes with economic consequences. Multimedia contents now starts to be processed in more hostile settings where the control, the surveillance and the filtering of multimedia information are central. Here, systems no longer magnify any cultural richness, but protect the commercial value of contents. Because there are valuable goods to protect, serious pirates will try to hack systems that typically filter illegal contents, monetize recommendations, enrich contents for better user experiences, ... Furthermore, this situation leverages for frequent security and privacy threats as outsourcing multimedia material is what millions of users do every day: people share their personal images on Picasa, Flickr or Facebook. It is well known that outsourcing data might be problematic as third parties can actively seek out end-user information from multimedia contents.

This talk will describe several research tracks we have been following to address this new challenge for multimedia search engines: enforcing the privacy and the security of multimedia contents at scale.