SYSTEM AND METHOD OF APPLYING ADAPTIVE PRIVACY CONTROLS TO LOSSY FILE TYPES

摘要

The proliferation of personal computing devices in recent years, especially mobile personal computing devices, combined with a growth in the number of widely-used communications formats has led to increased concerns regarding the safety and security of documents and messages that are sent over networks. Users desire a system that provides for the setting of custom access permissions at a file-level or sub-file-level. Such a system may allow the user to apply customized privacy settings (and, optionally, encryption keys) differently to particular portions of a document—even if the document is of a ‘lossy’ file type, e.g., a JPEG image. According to some embodiments, the custom access permission settings may be implemented by obfuscating portions of the original file and then embedding “secret,” e.g., hidden and/or encrypted, versions of the obfuscated portions in parts of the data structure of the original lossy file before transmitting the file to the desired recipients.