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.