With the rise of real-time technology, automation, and digital transformation, video monitoring and photo shooting are today’s necessities. Let’s take for example an in-store customer tracking system that helps manage customers queues and staff location or real-time road traffic monitoring system with automatic incident detection technology to provide better traffic management and alerting all necessary departments when the car incident happened.
There are a lot of personal insights hidden inside the digital image that was taken with a professional photo camera or via cellphone. Who can use it and for what purpose?
In the beginning of October in 2020, the White House published 2 photos in which Donald Trump reads and signs documents. Incidentally, on the previous day, he announced that he had contracted the coronavirus, and the photos apparently showed the president in good health. Ivanka (his daughter) posted a photo on Twitter with the words: “Nothing can stop dad from working for the United States and its citizens.”
However, attentive observers noticed something unusual.
These pictures were taken in two different rooms of the “Walter Reed National Military Medical Center”. In one photo, Trump is wearing an office jacket and the other is wearing an office shirt. Along with statements about well-being and active work, the photos hinted that the president had been performing his duties all day despite his illness. However, special timestamps on the photos indicate that the photos were taken at intervals of 10 minutes.
There are, of course, many explanations for this fact.
The photographer could only have permission to shoot for 10 minutes, perhaps Trump always works in different offices. However, the fact that people noticed the time stamps in the photo, the White House was not happy. The media began to speculate that the photo shoot was organized on purpose and that Trump apparently did not work all day.
This is not the first time that metadata (invisible information) within digital photography has led to undesirable consequences. Ask, for example, John McAfee, the founder of the antivirus program of the same name. In 2012, he fled Belize’s Central American government. Vice reporters tracked him down and posted a picture of him on the Internet with the headline “We’re now with John McAfee,… [stupid].”
However, without realizing it, they released information about the whereabouts of a famous businessman. He was soon found and detained in Guatemala.
Is it possible that your own photos tell the world more than you can imagine?
Let’s start from a simple workflow: when someone takes a photo (selfie), the camera of a smartphone or professional digital camera instantly stores metadata in an image file. This is an automated process which is happening with each image taken. This metadata stores information like when, where, and via which camera the photo was taken. Any metadata can be extracted using freely available online tools. We’ve checked photos from this Barberstyle website.
But many people do not know either that such information exists or how it can be used. And quietly posting images online. Some social networks remove geolocation information (although only from public access), but many other sites do not. Insufficient awareness of metadata is useful for investigators, but can violate the confidentiality of personal data for law-abiding citizens.
Risks coming with photos published online
When people are posting photos online or tagging someone, they do not realize that all the information coming wvia metadata can be used by criminals against the photo owners. Unfortunately, criminals can also use this information. By knowing when, where and with whom the photo was taken, they can commit robberies or harass people. But metadata coming with a photo isn’t the only information hidden in your photos.
There is also a thing called a unique personal identifier that helps to associate each photo with the specific camera used. Even professional photographers do not always remember the existence of such a mark. Every digital camera, including a smartphone, has an image sensor. It consists of millions of light-sensitive elements that absorb light – “photocytes”. During the absorption of photons (light) there is a so-called photo effect, when light “knocks out” electrons from matter. The charge of electrons released from a photocyte is measured and converted into a digital value. As a result, we obtain a single value for each photocyte, which describes the amount of light detected. This is how a photograph or a picture with light is formed.
However, due to the imperfection of the manufacturing process of image sensors, the size of each photocyte is slightly different. This causes some light-sensitive elements to become more or less sensitive to light than they should be.
Fake photos
“Heterogeneity of photosensitivity” allows researchers to detect fake photos.
In general, photography fairly accurately reflects the physical world, and therefore can be reliable evidence. However, in today’s world of misinformation, where image editing is evolving, information about the origin, integrity, and nature of digital imaging is becoming increasingly important.
Friedrich patented the technique of dactyloscopy of photographs. It has been officially approved for use in court cases in the United States.In other words, investigators can now identify fake areas of a photo, as well as link the image to a specific camera and establish a history of its processing.
Friedrich believes that this technology can also be used to detect synthetic images created by artificial intelligence, such as dipfeys. Previous research confirms this. A distinctive feature of dipfeik is its realism. Having won the notorious fame in 2018 in pornographic videos, dipfeys pose a significant threat to the information ecosystem. If we cannot distinguish what is real and what is not, then we can doubt any media information.
In the post-truth era, the ability to recognize fakes is extremely important.
However, the photographic “fingerprint” can be used with criminal intent, says Hani Farid, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and the founder of forensic digital imaging.