[mananaysiempre]

... Ideal for a repressive government or just a mildly corrupt government agency / corporate body to use to identify defectors, leakers, whistleblowers, or other dissidents. (Digital image sensors effectively already mark their output due to randomness of semiconductor manufacturing, and that has already been used by abovementioned actors for the abovementioned purposes. But that at least is difficult.) Tell me with a straight face that a culture that produced Chat Control or attempted to track forwarding chains of chat messages[1] won’t mandate device-unique watermarks kept on file by the communications regulator. And those are the more liberal governments by today’s standards.

I’m surprised how eager people are to build this kind of tech. It was quite a scandal (if ultimately a fruitless one) when it came out colour printers marked their output with unique identifiers; and now that generative AI is a thing stuff like TFA is seen as virtuous somehow. Can we maybe not forget about humans?..

[1] I don’t remember where I read about the latter or which country it was about—maybe India?

[baltimore]

> ... for a repressive government ...

Why shouldn't a virtuous and transparent government (should one materialize somehow, somewhere) be interested in identifying leakers?

[mananaysiempre]

That’s like asking why a fair and just executive shouldn’t be interested in eliminating the overhead of an independent judiciary. Synchronically, it should. Diachronically, that’s one of the things that ensures that it remains fair and just. Similarly for transparency and leakers, though we usually call those leakers “sources speaking on condition of anonymity” or some such. (It does mean that the continued transparency of a modern democratic government depends on people’s continual perpetration of—for the most part—mildly illegal acts. Make of that what you will.)

[Jerrrrrrry]

Both can be true! This is essentially making it easier to do [x] argument, which itself is essentially security through obscurity.

It was always possible to do watermark everything: any nearly-imperceptible bit can be used to encode data that can be used overtly.

Now enabling everyone everywhere to do it and integrate it may have second-order effects that were opposite of one's intention.

It is very convenient thing, for no one to trust what they can see. Unless it was Validated (D) by the Gubmint (R), it is inscrutable and unfalsifiable.

[willcipriano]

If they are transparent, what is leaking?

[baltimore]

There is always a need for _some_ secrets to be kept. At the very least from external adversaries.

[driverdan]

> Why shouldn't a virtuous and transparent government

That doesn't exist.

[palata]

The parent comment says that it has dangerous use-cases, not that it does not have desirable ones.

[Jach]

I stopped myself from making the printer analogy, but of course it's relevant, as is the fact that few seem to care. I personally hope some group strikes back to sanitize images watermarked this way, with no more difficulty than removing exif data.