Issue 86: Tracking Media Provenance, Digital Classroom Surveillance, Don’t Pixelate to Redact, An…

Issue 86: Tracking Media Provenance, Digital Classroom Surveillance, Don’t Pixelate to Redact, Android In-App Advertising

I’ve deleted what I originally had here as newsletter-opening-banter. These are serious times. I think the world has radically changed overnight, and roughly 7.9 billion of us are not in positions to do anything about it. To those that are in positions to do something about it and to those that are caught up in the effects of one man’s decision to impose
his
will on others: may you be safe, may you succeed, and may you find peace. For those coming to this after early 2022, yesterday Russia invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine.
Russia invaded the sovern country of Ukraine
The threads this week:
Specification for Media Content Provenance
Encroaching on Digital Privacy in the Classroom
Pixelation for Redaction → bad
Google Changes Up In-App Advertising
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Specification for Media Content Provenance
Today, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an organization established to provide publishers, creators, and consumers with opt-in, flexible ways to understand the authenticity and provenance across various media types, released version 1.0 of its technical specification for digital provenance. This specification is the first of its kind and empowers content creators and editors worldwide to create tamper-evident media, by enabling them to selectively disclose information about who created or changed digital content and how it was altered. The C2PA’s work is the result of industry-wide collaborations focused on digital media transparency that will accelerate progress toward global adoption of content provenance.
—
C2PA Releases Specification of World’s First Industry Standard for Content Provenance
, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, 26-Jan-2022
Elements of the C2PA specification.
[Source]
This is a fascinating development.
Although the target audience for this technology is news organizations and citizen journalists to provide a way to establish the creator and editors of media, one could easily envision using this standard to mark images, video, and audio from digital archives.
As a way of combatting problems like manipulated media and «deep fakes», the specification would allow news organizations to cryptographically «sign» the media in a way that a display tool—via a media tool on your device or a browser plugin—would be able to decode and display to the viewer.
If the cryptographic signature doesn’t match the one published by the news organization, you would know that the media has been changed.
Or, from the perspective of an…