cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/58212892

I think it is possible to embed invisible information into videos and images. This way peopple could track where you got an image from, the source from which you copied it, and people who copy your image to share it again. https://github.com/ShieldMnt/invisible-watermark

Services like youtube or twitter could embed such watermarks into content they serve to specific users without them knowing; Smartphone-cameras could mark images in secret.

I guess blurring, rotating or dithering the image could destroy watermarks. Or maybe just sharing a screenshot of an image instead of the original image. Format conversions may help too.

Keywords: digital-watermarking. tracking.

  • Deme@sopuli.xyz
    12·
    1 day ago

    I’m not quite as concerned. Images don’t report back by themselves like a link that has the sharing info appended to it does, so the platform (or a crawler reading that platform) would need to actively read those watermarks. Also when someone copies and shares the image again, the watermark stays the same and now they don’t know if the image was shared from the original source or the first sharer, unless that platform rewrote the watermark to remain unique. So a waterproof chain of attributions would need all the platforms involved cooperating with each other.