The Hidden Fingerprint Inside Your Photos
21st July 2021
When considering these privacy issues, we might draw parallels with another technology. Many colour printers add secret tracking dots to documents: virtually invisible yellow dots that reveal a printer’s serial number, as well as the date and time a document was printed. In 2017, these dots may have been used by the FBI in the identification of Reality Winner as the source of a leaked National Security Agency document, which detailed alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
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Standard metadata is difficult enough to avoid – you have to scrub it afterwards, and the only piece of information you can stop from being created in the first instance is photo geolocation. Photo response non-uniformity, however, is far more difficult to extricate. Technically, it should be possible to suppress, for example, by reducing the image resolution, says Farid. But, by how much? This of course depends on many factors such as the type of device used for image capture, as well as the fingerprint matching algorithm employed. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to fingerprint removal.