Innovative solution to prevent smart home devices from breaching privacy

Protecting personal privacy has become of paramount importance as smart home devices become ubiquitous.

PrivacyLens, a groundbreaking camera technology developed by a team of engineers at the University of Michigan, offers users protection from the risk of sensitive photos and videos collected by smart home cameras and robotic vacuums being leaked.

How does PrivacyLens work?

PrivacyLens uses a dual camera system that includes a standard video camera and a heat-sensing camera.

The advanced technology can recognize individuals and replace their images with generic stick figures, by detecting the body temperature of people within its field of view.

The stick figures accurately reflect the movements of real people, ensuring that camera-based devices work without compromising the privacy of the people in the image.

“Most consumers don’t think about what happens to the data their favorite smart home devices collect,” said Alanson Sample, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Maryland and author of the study. “In most cases, raw audio, images, and videos from these devices are streamed to the manufacturers’ cloud servers, regardless of whether the data is actually needed for the end application. A smart device that strips out personally identifiable information before sending sensitive data to private servers would be a much more secure product than what we currently have.”

PrivacyLens aims to address the pressing problem of private moments being captured and unintentionally shared online.

The engineering team hopes that this advanced technology will encourage people to use cameras to monitor health and fitness at home, without worrying about privacy violations.