"Keeping the Unseen Safe: Improving Digital Privacy for Blind People"
Like sighted people, blind people post on Instagram, text photos to group chats, and more. They also learn about their visual surroundings through photos. Blind users often share their images with Microsoft's Seeing AI, Be My Eyes, and other identification software to learn about their visual surroundings. The demand for such software is high, as indicated by the 20 million times Seeing AI has been used. However, when blind users share images, there is an increased risk of them unknowingly capturing private information such as a return address. A cross-institutional team has been awarded over $1 million through a Safe and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore the issue. The team's goal is to develop a novel system capable of alerting blind users when an image contains information considered private. In a general use case, the tool will alert the user about what private information is detected and then present a choice to either discard the image, share the image as-is, or share an edited version where the private content is made obscure. This article continues to discuss the team's four-year interdisciplinary project aimed at strengthening digital privacy for blind people.