[GistNoesis]

I don't have a lot of info on the quality of the visual derivative.

But since a human should look at it should have enough details to distinguish subtle cases like the age of the people in the picture, otherwise it's even more concerning.

If some human has enough info to make this call then the low-res greyscale visual derivative should still raise some flags if it get through a forensic software, as steganography software usually offer some resistance against usual compression artifacts.

[simondotau]

I don't know exactly what's in the safety token, but we do know that it's grayscale and low resolution.

Allow me to be hypothetical for a moment; let's assume for a moment that the image has all chroma data stripped, it's downsampled to 1 megapixel, and then compressed to around 100 kilobytes using JPEG or HEIC. That would be sufficient for performing careful human review but would completely demolish any steganography.