Never heard of C2PA? This standard promoted by Adobe and others makes it possible to better assess the authenticity of a photo, and thus to fight against misleading information. Explanations.
The fight against fake news on the Internet never stops. For several years, all the major web players have fought relentlessly against the spread of misleading news on their platforms, be it Google, Facebook or Twitter. The latest platform to fight against this scourge is none other than Adobe, the famous Photoshop editor. And his approach is surprising.
Instead of focusing on the eradication of fake news on a single site, the company wants to set up a multi-platform system capable of attesting to the veracity of an image and establishing clear traceability for all the photos posted on the Net (or almost). This small tool takes the form of an open source development kit that can be used by all development teams. Once integrated into a site, this module will be able to deliver precise information on the photos posted online. Date of creation of the image, types of manipulations carried out with retouching software, derivative uses, etc. The data made available is intended to help Internet users and journalists differentiate between a dubious montage and a real news photo.
Twitter, Microsoft and BBC as backup
A little like the Exif which informs the conditions of capture of the snapshot (speed, ISO, aperture, etc.), the “content credentials” (or information on the content) as Adobe designates them, are intended to accompany all the images who roam the net. The idea being that this data is attached to the image and that each social network, each application and each software implements the Adobe tool to offer more transparency on the content posted. Unlike Exif, this metadata, from a standard called C2PA, is difficult to delete. Each photo inherits a unique cryptographic fingerprint that allows, even if it has passed through the mill of editing software, to trace its information.
Adobe’s system, like all the others, is not infallible and a highly motivated hacker can always overwrite this data, but the company hopes that by attracting enough companies and associations around this new standard, it will be able to flourish on the Web. For the moment, Microsoft, Sony, Intel, Twitter, the BBC or even the AP press agency have promised to set up this system. With Adobe behind, which has started to deploy its tool in Photoshop, there is a chance that the C2PA standard will have a bright future on the Web. Or at least, that all photos that are not accompanied by this metadata create suspicion.