Fake photos online are increasing exponentially and with it misinformation. After all, it is a natural and inevitable consequence of the ease with which you can retouch a photo with a single tap on your smartphone.
The chances of coming across a tutorial on how to edit a photo while scrolling through your Instagram, Facebook, and other social feeds are extremely high. Moving a subject, removing a detail, cropping a background now requires zero skills and zero time, so anyone can become a photo editor and share sometimes harmless, sometimes dangerous creations online.
Fake photos: increasingly easy to create and spread
Approximately 54,400 photos are taken per second with smartphones, a total of 1.72 trillion per year, and billions of these images,as well as videos, are shared online every day. How many of them are real? How many are false? Can you tell the true from the false?
It is evident how these data grow exponentially following technological advancement and how consequently the line between what is true and what is false grows thinner and thinner. A major problem is also the lack of a regulatory authority to control the quality of information shared online, consequently making it of low quality and reliability.
Added to this is the simplicity and accessibility with which even the most complex of editing tasks can now be done. In fact, each phone player invests and bets heavily on the camera of the next model: for example, the even more amazing quality of photos and videos is always emphasized in marketing campaigns.
The highest quality photos are followed by the thousands of apps that simplify editing tools, thus enabling retouching and manipulation that until recently was only possible with professional and complex tools such as photoshop. Moreover, we are already witnessing the next phase with Google and Apple that integrate the most popular editing tools directly into their default systems. With iOS 16, for example, it is possible to completely contour the subject of the photo with a single tap, an operation that previously required skills, professional tools, and most importantly, time.
With the following videos, we highlight how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to edit photos on the smartphone in a matter of moments:
How to ensure the authenticity of documents and images with an app
In the absence of authority and legislation to regulate this flow of manipulated photos and fake news, technology as a solution can only come into the picture again. Using the same weapon to be able to guarantee the authenticity and unchangeability of photos and restore trust in the digital world is TrueScreen’s mission.
Ensuring that a photo does not run the risk of being edited and manipulated is a new and pressing need because photos, but also video, audio, screenshots, are often used to substantiate facts or events. For this TrueScreen develops an app of the same name that validates and certifies with legal value all media files that can be captured with a mobile device.
TrueScreen is an easy-to-use and intuitive app that allows you to instantly apply a time stamp and digital seal, guaranteeing date certain of the time of capture and making manipulation of the captured content impossible.
From content capture within the app to forensic report generation, the entire chain of custody of digital evidence is preserved using ISO 27037 Standard-compliant forensic methodologies and procedures.