The Looming Privacy Challenges Posed by Commercial Satellite Imaging: Remedies and Research Directions

As commercial satellites proliferate and data-capture technologies become more diverse, accessible, and high-resolution, new privacy concerns emerge. Additionally, emerging trends such as direct-to-consumer image sales and AI-enhanced computer vision strongly impact the satellite imaging industry. While these technologies benefit applications such as natural disaster monitoring and precision agriculture, they also introduce novel privacy risks. This perspective paper provides several contributions: we start by analyzing privacy risks using the LINDDUN privacy framework, categorizing threats like linking, identification, and data disclosure. Moving on from these findings, we introduce and discuss a few mitigation strategies, including inpainting and access control. Finally, we highlight some research directions to address these emerging challenges. Overall, this work characterizes the major issues in the evolving privacy landscape of satellite imaging, provides actionable solutions to mitigate these privacy risks, and highlights future research directions, positioning itself as a reference for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders.