[octoberfranklin]

I imagine they don't even want the fingerprints "getting out". Imagine if you had the fingerprints and the algorithm. This can't possibly be a cryptographic hash (too fragile); it's got to be possible to find "collisions" that have no relationship to the original image, and probably don't even look like images of anything at all.

Imagine the chaos someone could cause.

It'd be like back in 2010ish when somebody encoded a bunch of malware into bitcoin transactions: every bitcoin node running any kind of antivirus software was immediately kicked offline. Many AV programs deleted their owners' copy of bitcoind. It was madness. Forced the bitcoin developers to store the blockchain on-disk xored with a different random number unique to each computer.