"Before, I Asked My Mom, Now I Ask ChatGPT": Visual Privacy Management with Generative AI for Blind and Low-Vision People
This addresses visual privacy management for blind and low-vision people using generative AI, offering user-centered design recommendations.
The paper investigated how blind and low-vision individuals use generative AI tools for visual content interpretation, finding through interviews with 21 participants that they balance privacy, efficiency, and emotional agency across six key scenarios, and identified design preferences like on-device processing and sensitive content redaction.
Blind and low vision (BLV) individuals use Generative AI (GenAI) tools to interpret and manage visual content in their daily lives. While such tools can enhance the accessibility of visual content and so enable greater user independence, they also introduce complex challenges around visual privacy. In this paper, we investigate the current practices and future design preferences of blind and low vision individuals through an interview study with 21 participants. Our findings reveal a range of current practices with GenAI that balance privacy, efficiency, and emotional agency, with users accounting for privacy risks across six key scenarios, such as self-presentation, indoor/outdoor spatial privacy, social sharing, and handling professional content. Our findings reveal design preferences, including on-device processing, zero-retention guarantees, sensitive content redaction, privacy-aware appearance indicators, and multimodal tactile mirrored interaction methods. We conclude with actionable design recommendations to support user-centered visual privacy through GenAI, expanding the notion of privacy and responsible handling of others data.