Effectiveness and Users’ Experience of Face Blurring as a Privacy Protection for Sharing Photos via Online Social Networks

Photo sharing on online social networks (OSNs) can cause privacy issues. Face blurring is one strategy to increase privacy while still allowing users to share photos. To explore the potential blurring has as a privacy-enhancing technology for OSN photos, we conducted an online experiment with 47 participants to evaluate the effectiveness of face blurring compared to the original photo (as-is), and users’ experience (satisfaction, information sufficiency, enjoyment, social presence, and filter likeability). Users’ experience ratings for face blurring were positive, indicating blurring may be an acceptable way to modify photos from the users’ perspective. However, from a privacy-enhancement perspective, while face blurring may be useful in some situations, such as those where the person in the photo is unknown to the viewer, in other cases, such as in an OSN where the person in the image is known to the viewer, face blurring does not provide privacy protection.

在线社交网络（OSNs）上的照片分享可能会引发隐私问题。面部模糊是一种在仍允许用户分享照片的同时提高隐私性的策略。为了探究模糊处理作为一种针对在线社交网络照片的隐私增强技术的潜力，我们对47名参与者进行了一项在线实验，以评估面部模糊相较于原始照片（未处理状态）的有效性，以及用户的体验（满意度、信息充足度、愉悦度、社交临场感和滤镜喜好度）。用户对面部模糊的体验评分是积极的，这表明从用户的角度来看，模糊可能是一种可接受的照片修改方式。然而，从隐私增强的角度来看，虽然面部模糊在某些情况下可能有用，比如照片中的人不为观看者所知的情况，但在其他情况下，比如在在线社交网络中照片里的人为观看者所熟知时，面部模糊并不能提供隐私保护。