The system is called PrivacyLens and consists of two cameras, one with a regular sensor and the other with a thermal sensor. The sensors identify a person by recording body temperature, and a regular camera “sees” the user as a stick figure. A person’s characteristic movements are transmitted without distortion, but the person is not visible.
According to the developers, PrivacyLens will help improve privacy, as hackers learn to hack “smart” devices and intercept private data from personal life. The system will not allow “smart” devices to unintentionally record everyday situations, including intimate moments; such pictures and videos are then uploaded to the service or special cloud servers or can become the property of blackmailers.
In the United States, such an embarrassment occurred when the iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner published a photo of a user in the toilet on its server, which then spread on the Internet. PrivacyLens was created to prevent this.
“A smart device that strips personal information before sending sensitive data to private servers would be a much more secure product than what we currently have,” said Alanson Sample, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the study.
Source: Ferra
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