this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Privacy

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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.

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

It sure is possible to embed invisible information into videos and images, it's called metadata. Now you might think of other techniques, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography but most if not all are, AFAIK (and I won't pretend I know the state of the art in the domain) if they are within the data itself (thus become data, not meta-data), e.g. a visible stamp in an image, are made to remain visible. Compression codecs are specifically targeting the visible or audible spectrum. One of the most basic way to "compress" lossy information (as opposed to lossless) is precisely to remove the ends of the spectrum that is not perceived by the average human audience.

So... AFAICT it's either visible and thus can be spotted (and thus can be removed, even if by adding a black mark over) or not visible but then most likely will be removed by basic compression codecs even without trying to do so.

TL;DR: no and I wouldn't be until I see this in the wild (not a research paper claimed it's technically possible).