Content Revocation

Common wisdom holds that once personal content such as photographs have been shared on the Internet, they will stay there forever. In this work we explore how to allow users to reclaim some degree of their privacy by “revoking” previously shared content, hindering any subsequent viewing or sharing by others. We aim to provide a mechanism through which end-user browsers and large content aggregators can identify revoked content with minimal performance overheads and can avoid rendering/storing/distributing it. Our goal is not to build a system that can withstand determined efforts to subvert it, but rather to give well-intentioned users the ability to respect the privacy wishes of others.