From private videos to public shows, video content has taken over the world. It helps you record and relive the most precious moments of your life, such as your baby’s first steps, your first date, a family vacation, or a long-awaited reunion. But what if our private videos fall into the wrong hands? With the increase in cyber-attacks and data breaches, protecting our private videos has become crucial. 

Throughout this blog, we will talk about why privacy is important and explore ways to protect your videos. 

In this blog:

• Privacy Matters
• The Importance of Privacy in Videos
• Why You Should Consider Making Private Videos
• Four Ways to Make Private Videos

The world relies heavily on digital media, and thousands of videos are shared across social media platforms by the minute. On the one hand, the combination of audio, visuals, emotions, and tone creates an engaging experience for the audience. On the other hand, video content might put your freedom and autonomy at risk. 

Clarifying social and personal boundaries may be challenging, as you must choose what you want to share and what you want to keep private. 

For all the right reasons, you need robust security features to ensure the encryption and security of your private videos. These features should include strict transformations, signed URLs, encrypted delivery, stringent controls, and authenticated access to keep unauthorized individuals and entities from accessing your private videos. 

Videos are valuable assets that help you capture the essence of the priceless moments you spend with your loved ones and relive them whenever you want to. However, this massive increase in video sharing also poses risks and privacy concerns. Here’s why video privacy is important: 

Protecting Personal Information: Almost all our private videos contain sensitive information—whether it’s facial recognition, secret conversations, or location. That’s why unauthorized access to these may lead to duplication and misuse. It can increase the risk of information and identity theft and may incur financial losses. 

Legal obligations: Countries across the globe have strict privacy laws for managing, storing, and sharing personal data. With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the US, you have to be vigilant in handling your personal data, especially videos. 

Stay on top of your video file security with security features that offer you complete control over the privacy of your videos and prevent misuse. 

Making your videos private is not only about hiding them from the general public; you also need to manage your content by controlling how your videos are shared and used. Consider the following: 

• Confidential Business Data: Videos are not always made for entertainment. In business, they may be a form of internal communication that plays a vital role in conferences and employee training sessions and contains confidential information. Hence, only authorized employees of a company should have access to them.
• Targets the Intended Audience: It is very important to keep control over your videos to reach the right audience, especially for content creators. When videos are public, they are open for everyone to share, but when private, they can only be shared with the intended audience.
• Prevention from Hackers: Public videos have open access and may easily be attacked by hackers. By making your videos private, you add a layer of security encryption, reducing the risk of misuse. 

We’ve cherry-picked the four best ways to make private videos and stay safe from all sorts of cyber threats. Here we go: 

The most straightforward and easiest way to keep your videos private is to delete them from social media. Social media is the riskiest place, giving millions of people access to your video content. Of course, you may lose control over who can view, share, or even download these videos. 

Once your videos are off social media, you can rest assured that you’re safe from any social media video misuse tactic.

Encryption is a powerful method for keeping your videos secure. Once encrypted, videos can only be accessed by the correct decryption key. That’s how encryption not only protects your videos from theft but also prevents them from being tampered with. 

Cloudinary offers robust CENC encryption to protect your videos against unauthorized access.

In Cloudinary, private videos can be encrypted and then uploaded as raw files. These files are not viewable within Cloudinary and require decryption after downloading. Once the videos are uploaded and encrypted with the Cloudinary widget, decryption is possible using the AES-GCM SubtleCrypto Library. 

For example, this code encrypts the files that need to be decrypted after downloading. 

encryption: { key: “ff234fe526725753fa45b53325”, iv: “cd8a46d72e26a365dca78ef” }: This defines the encryption settings for your media security when uploading. 

This code explains how the files are decrypted using the AES-GCM SubtleCrypto library.

• subtleCrypto.decrypt(): This is from SubtleCrypto to allow cryptographic operations in web browsers e.g. encryption and decryption.
• key: That’s the cryptographic key for decryption and should match the one that was created during encryption.
• Buffer: This is the actual encrypted data that you want to decrypt.

Hence, you can add a layer of advanced protection to your videos and share video content securely.

You can also enhance the privacy of your videos by forcing users to log into an account where your videos are hosted. You may even go a step further and only grant access to a portion of your users using the access control settings in the platform where you’ve stored your videos. 

Cloudinary offers a single sign-on, which allows users to access the content with the corporate credentials provided to them. For added security, you can use Cloudinary token-based authentication, where you can offer temporary access to certain users to view your video.

Requiring an account allows you to keep your video usage private. You can also use access logs to monitor who is viewing your video content.

This code features a look at the token-based authentication stating the access by a user to the video for 300 seconds (5 minutes), and also provides an access log for watching the video.

• .type(“authenticated”): This makes sure that the media is only accessible via authenticated URLs or with an authentication token. 
• AuthToken(“MyKey”): This creates a new authentication key using the key: MyKey. 
• .duration(300): This sets the token’s validity to 300 seconds (5 minutes), after which the URL becomes invalid. 

By marking your videos as private, you not only enjoy controlled access but can also prevent them from being indexed in search engine results, thus preventing any unintended discovery.  

Cloudinary allows you to make your videos private, allowing you to exercise full control over their access and make them unsearchable by the public. 

For example, you can only allow access to authenticated users and use signed URLs. These signed URLs are temporary encrypted links that expire after using them for certain times or after a fixed time period.

Using this code, you can create a signed video tag for your private video, e.g., “secret video,” which has been resized using fill resize mode. 

• .signed(true) option adds a signature to the generated URL and prevents any unauthorized access. 
• .type(“authenticated”) makes sure that your video is accessible only via authenticated access, making it absolutely private. 

Private videos impact SEO because search engines cannot index the videos marked as private. Such videos can be accessed by authorized users only, and they won’t generate traffic to your website.

However, if you maintain a balance between public and private content, you can manage your SEO and website traffic. You can create short clips that are SEO optimized and accessible to the public, and then, with these public videos, you can drive traffic to your private videos. Private videos protected by signed URLs still allow you to receive filtered traffic.

When you create a balance between private and public video content, you can keep the audience attracted and engaged while allowing access to authorized users.

Protecting private videos is essential, and Cloudinary gives you an opportunity to do this effectively. Choosing secure methods, such as signed URLs and authentication and encryption, helps you keep your videos safe. So, let’s take a step towards protecting your video content and sign up for Cloudinary to make the best use of its privacy and security features.