Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Timestamp Paparazzi Sync Drone!
You’ve probably heard about deepfakes, i.e. very realistic fake video that show someone — usually someone famous — doing something they never did.
You can find some funny examples on the interwebs. Videos with a fake President Obama dissing Trump, and so on.
As AI gets better, so does the quality of these fake videos.
So much better, in fact, that some people predict that the fake videos will be virtually indistinguishable from real videos in as little as six months.
We’ll probably get to a point where professional forensic analysts can’t even tell the difference.
The obvious risk here is that someone could trash your reputation by creating a video of you doing or saying something scandalous. That’s especially risky if your career — as a movie star or politican, for example — is supposed to be based on your reputation and appearances.
Where does this end up? How are people going to protect their reputations?
One way might be timestamp video recordings of yourself ALL THE TIME.
Yes, that sounds like some dystopian idea you’d find in a Black Mirror episode.
But if you’re a politician you might actually like that :)
Seriously, how it might work is that:
- You record yourself all the time. In bed, in the bathroom, everywhere.
- You securely store the video so if some video pops up somewhere with “you” in it, you say “It wasn’t me!” and you have an alibi.
And what better way to record yourself all the time than a personal drone? :)
It could hover over your shoulder all the time. Maybe even get a couple to form a paparazzi-style entourage.
However you choose to record yourself, there are a couple of technical details to cover here.
One issue is timestamping — which you can do easily on a blockchain like BlockStamp.
You can timestamp any size file any time you want.
Check out this feature in the BlockStamp online wallet, for example. That’s your way to say the video happened at a certain time.
The other issue is verifying that it is actually you in the timestamped video. We haven’t seen a solution for this yet.
It is theoretically possible, for example, that someone could do a real-time deepfake video with your AI-generated face and timestamp it.
A solution might involve some sort of a beacon with a unique signature that you implant under your skin.
Your paparazzi drone would also have some sort of unique signature that could sync with yours — and keep a record of this sync. The video with the sync record then gets timestamped.
This way, when a video of you pops up without this sync record pops up, it is automatically suspect.
But you can’t prove it wasn’t you unless you have another timestamped video — with the sync record — of yourself doing something else.
You could, for example, have left your paparazzi sync drone at home while you sneak out to make inflammatory, insensitive remarks in a public place.
It is better to have proof that you were at home quietly having politically correct thoughts at the time the fake video was recorded.
Fun to think about!
Don’t forget to check out the BlockStamp online wallet’s timestamping feature. You might just see it built into a whacky applications in the future :)
Make sure you’re part of the BlockStamp social community and feel free to ask any questions there!
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a Bitcoin blockchain fork hosting an ecosystem of fair play apps, including a true-odds multiplayer crypto gambling platform, a decentralized marketplace listing optimizer, and a private messenger with sword-in-the-stone encryption (launching soon).
