Combating “Fake News” With a Smartphone “Proof Mode”

We have been working for many years with our partners at WITNESS, a leading human rights media training and advocacy organization, to figure out how best to turn smartphone cameras into tools of empowerment for activists. While it is often enough to use the visual pixels you capture to create awareness or pressure on an issue, sometimes you want those pixels to actually be treated as evidence. This means, you want people to trust what they see, to know it hasn’t been tampered with, and to believe that it came from the time, place and person you say it came from.
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On the technical front, what the app is doing is automatically generating an OpenPGP key for this installed instance of the app itself, and using that to automatically sign all photos and videos at time of capture. A sha256 hash is also generated, and combined with a snapshot of all available device sensor data, such as GPS location, wifi and mobile networks, altitude, device language, hardware type, and more. This is also signed, and stored with the media. All of this happens with no noticeable impact on battery life or performance, every time the user takes a photo or video. We have been running it for months on fairly old, low end phones, and you just forget it is happening

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Interesting concept and a start. Hopefully this will conteract some of the photoshoping of images since it can be proved as untampered.

a reply to: roadgravel

Until it reveals things you don't like. Then it becomes "hacked."

a reply to: DJW001

An App made right out of the Kremlin.

a reply to: roadgravel

Or we could transition our schools from just repeating "facts" over and over rewarding the parrots to teaching critical thinking.

Teaching children to question everything instead of using their phone as an enema getting all their "facts" from shady sources.

The fakes news part they used is a bit misleading.

Think about how many photos are questioned as to being real. It's more about faked picture or videos.

originally posted by: jellyrev
a reply to: DJW001

An App made right out of the Kremlin.

It does have potential applications when used in good faith but, aye, there's the rub.

I suppose proof that a video or photo is unaltered is a bit evil. Puts a big dent in the hoaxer movement.

a reply to: roadgravel

Good, let's catch Donald and his team creating fake news, as they do......his fake news about the U.S. crime rate he preached over and over.....

Forget the preconceived notion of fake news. That term probably should not have been in their title.

It's about photographic information from a phone camera.

originally posted by: roadgravel
The fakes news part they used is a bit misleading.

Think about how many photos are questioned as to being real. It's more about faked picture or videos.

Well, I need to agree with that, especially with media that will incur changes once placed on the 'net, never even mind if it is true or not in the first instance, there is a need to get real with that. Digital stuff is so crappy at being honest Joe.
What it amounts to is only yourself having a pristine event never to be shared on any other media, except someone else's eyeball.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

The problem with over thinking everything is that it doesn't lend to a stable society. Without theory taught as fact, people would spend more time on thinking rather than doing. Say goodbye to progress and innovation. Without those things, we would be worshipping stars as Gods and believing the wind is an entity. Perhaps a deity. Understand?
There's a small percentage of people who could think like you and would be unaffected by the outcome but certainly not the entire population. I understand what you are saying and on the face of it, you are correct. It's the end result that would not be beneficial in the long run, though. Feel me? I'm still going to star your comment though bc I concur to a point. But, I don't believe everyone is that perceptive as a whole.