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People who are blind share their images and videos with companies that provide visual assistance technologies (VATs) to gain access to information about their surroundings. A challenge is that people who are blind cannot independently validate the content of the images and videos before they share them, and their visual data commonly contains private content. We examine privacy concerns for blind people who share personal visual data with VAT companies that provide descriptions authored by humans or artifcial intelligence (AI) . We frst interviewed 18 people who are blind about their perceptions of privacy when using both types of VATs. Then we asked the participants to rate 21 types of image content according to their level of privacy concern if the information was shared knowingly versus unknowingly with human- or AI-powered VATs. Finally, we analyzed what information VAT companies communicate to users about their collection and processing of users’ personal visual data through their privacy policies. Our fndings have implications for the development of VATs that safeguard blind users’ visual privacy, and our methods may be useful for other camera-based technology companies and their users.
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Privacy Considerations of the Visually Impaired with Camera Based Assistive Technologies: Misrepresentation, Impropriety, and Fairness
Camera based assistive technologies such as smart glasses can provide people with visual impairments (PVIs) information about people in their vicinity. Although such ‘visually available’ information can enhance one’s social interactions, the privacy implications for bystanders from the perspective of PVIs remains underexplored. Motivated by prior findings of bystanders’ perspectives, we conducted two online surveys with visually impaired (N=128) and sighted (N=136) participants with two ‘field-of-view’ (FoV) experimental conditions related to whether information about bystanders was gathered from the front of the glasses or all directions. We found that PVIs considered it as ‘fair’ and equally useful to receive information from all directions. However, they reported being uncomfortable in receiving some visually apparent information (such as weight and gender) about bystanders as they felt it was ‘impolite’ or ‘improper’. Both PVIs and bystanders shared concerns about the fallibility of AI, where bystanders can be misrepresented by the devices. Our finding suggests that beyond issues of social stigma, both PVIs and bystanders have shared concerns that need to be considered to improve the social acceptability of camera based assistive technologies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1814513
- PAR ID:
- 10298019
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3417003
