ENSURING IMAGE PRIVACY AND USER TRUST IN SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORMS

The rapid growth of social media has increased photo sharing, raising concerns about the exposure of personal and sensitive information. When images contain multiple individuals, protecting their privacy becomes essential. This paper presents a trust-based approach for secure sharing of jointly owned photos. The proposed method anonymizes images by masking the identities of individuals at risk, with the level of anonymization determined by the publisher’s privacy requirements and the trust level of the recipient. A greedy threshold selection technique is used to balance privacy protection and image usability. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively reduces the risk of privacy leakage while maintaining acceptable data quality, enabling safer and more reliable photo sharing in social media platforms.