Against Evidentiary Replication: Privacy-Preserving Infrastructures for Image-Based Abuse Cases

Project description:
Image-based abuse is often framed as a problem of unlawful disclosure: an intimate image is captured, published, distributed, or threatened without consent, and the legal system responds by identifying the perpetrator and seeking removal. However, this framing is incomplete. For victim-survivors, the abuse is not a single act of publication but a continuing condition of sexualised exposure. The same image that the survivor wants erased from platforms must often be submitted to police, lawyers, prosecutors, forensic experts, courts, e-discovery vendors, platform-governance systems, and sometimes defence counsel. The legal remedy can, therefore, create new institutional archives of the abusive material. This paper calls that problem the evidentiary privacy paradox: the legal process proves image-based abuse by preserving and circulating the object through which the abuse is committed.

This paper argues for a survivor-centred and Global Majority-sensitive evidentiary architecture for image-based abuse. The proposed solution is a Restricted Privacy Evidence Protocol built on but not limited to canonical evidence objects, encrypted evidence vaults, signed hash certificates, tiered visibility, victim-survivor-auditable access logs, and optional use of zero-knowledge proofs for technical verification. Fully homomorphic encryption may have future value, but signed hashes and institutional governance should remain the practical backbone. The paper proposes an architectural philosophy rather than a fully specified implementation: the central shift is from evidence transfer to governed access.

Keywords:
Image-based abuse; non-consensual intimate imagery; evidentiary privacy; protected identity; sexual autonomy; Global South; digital evidence; hash evidence; zero-knowledge proofs; privacy-enhancing cryptography; survivor-auditable governance.

Contributors:
Rohini Lakshané

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