JPEG Looking To Add DRM To Images… Supposedly To Protect Images From Gov't Surveillance

from the png,-here-we-come dept

You may recall the mess a few years ago when, under pressure from the movie studios, along with Netflix and Microsoft, the W3C agreed to add DRM to HTML5. This resulted in lots of debates and reasonable anger from people who found that the idea of building DRM into HTML5 went against the idea of an open internet. And, now it appears that the organization behind the JPEG standard for images is heading down a similar path.

The JPEG committee investigates solutions to assure privacy and security when sharing photos on social networks, (stock) photography databases, etc. JPEG Privacy & Security will provide new functionality to JPEG encoded images such as ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual rights, while maintaining backwards and forward compatibility to existing JPEG legacy solutions.

Further details suggest DRM that has all sorts of conditions included:

What’s interesting is that some are claiming this is based on this research paper that pitches such DRM for the purpose of protecting images from surveillance and such:

? With the popularization of online social networks (OSNs) and smart mobile devices, photo sharing is becoming a part of people? daily life. An unprecedented number of photos are being uploaded and shared everyday through online social networks or photo hosting services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr. However, such unrestrained online photo or multimedia sharing has raised serious privacy concerns, especially after reports of citizens surveillance by governmental agencies and scandalous leakage of private photos from prominent photo sharing sites or online cloud services. Popular OSNs typically offer privacy protection solutions only in response to the public demand and therefore are often rudimental, complex to use, and provide limited degree of control and protection. Most solutions allow users to control either who can access the shared photos or for how long they can be accessed. In contrast, in this paper, we take a structured privacy by design approach to the problem of online photo privacy protection. We propose a privacy-preserving photo sharing architecture based on a secure JPEG scrambling algorithm capable of protecting the privacy of multiple users involved in a photo. We demonstrate the proposed photo sharing architecture with a prototype application called ProShare that offers JPEG scrambling as the privacy protection tool for selected regions in a photo, secure access to the protected images, and secure photo sharing on Facebook.

Now that’s definitely interesting, but it still raises some concerns about whether such DRM would actually be used to protect an individual’s privacy or (much more likely) to try to limit public use of images for other reasons, such as trying to set up tollbooths on use (even fair use). I also wonder how effective any image-based DRM can really be in the longterm, given the ease of simply screenshotting an image to make a copy.

Filed Under: control, drm, images, jpeg, surveillance