Truepic’s New SDK Will Power Trusted Photo Capture Across the Internet

Five years ago, we embarked on our journey with a fundamental belief about what the future should look like. People should be able to trust what they see and hear on the internet.

Today, we’re taking an enormous step forward on this journey. Truepic has launched our iOS and Android Software Development Kit (SDK), called Truepic Lens. This new product allows any mobile application to integrate our award winning secure camera technology, directly in their own app.

The result? Any mobile app can now capture and display the industry’s most trusted digital photo. Even better — every photo captured through Lens conforms to the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) open internet specification, launching at a special event today, January 26th. During the event, a preview of the entire system, from capture to display, will be shown in action.

One big question remains — how quickly can we drive adoption of this new product across the mobile app ecosystem? We’ve never been better equipped to make this happen. In 2021, Truepic grew its team by more than 70%, customer base and revenues by over 150%, verified images by over 500%, and closed a $26M Series B financing led by strategic investors, including Microsoft, Adobe, Sony, Hearst, and others.

Why does this matter?

At this very moment — millions of people are actively altering your perception of the world, and what’s transpiring around you. Why?

Most manipulate media without maligned intention but rather for entertainment purposes. However, even seemingly benign alterations can lead to negative consequences — especially when impressionable youth regularly consume “perfect images” on social media, causing them to lose touch of reality or contribute to lower self-esteem.

Some are bad actors submitting falsified insurance claims, driving your rates up. Others are creating false profiles and scamming your friends and family on internet dating platforms. Some are creating fake ride share accounts, leading to assaults (over 4k+ instances in the past three years on a single platform). Others are creating fake listings on peer-to-peer commerce sites, which at best, leads to simple fraud, and at worst, leads to even more assault/deaths. Some are participating in the spread of falsified information about COVID, treatments, and vaccines for social and/or political gain.

If this all were not bad enough — synthetic media (deepfake) technology has improved in speed, ease of creation, and quality in 2021. As one example, the technology has been democratized so far that anyone visiting thispersondoesnotexist.com can generate synthetic head shots with the refresh of a web browser. Experts such as Nina Schick are expecting billions of synthetic images and videos to be created in 2022. As more synthetic media is generated at little-to-no cost by computers, the more our reality will be distorted as nothing can be easily trusted as original and genuine.

This is deeply troubling to us, and we’d imagine it is to you too.

Can Truepic solve all of this distortion in its entirety? Absolutely not. Problems of this magnitude require a whole-of-society approach to resolve. But, Truepic’s bet is that by empowering people to spread high-integrity visual content, we can dramatically counterbalance the spread of false content. By knowing with high confidence what is real, we can better determine what might be fake.

How does the SDK work?

Expect some of your favorite companies to begin integrating Truepic Lens into their mobile applications over the coming year. This includes insurers, banks, marketplaces, dating sites, rental sites, media publications, and more. These services can begin capturing original content through Truepic immediately, helping to eliminate visual deception, which is a key vector in committing fraud.

Over time, on services that display digital images back to you, these photos and videos will be shown with an informational indicator. This indicator allows you, the viewer, to dive a layer deeper into the digital content you are viewing, and see the original, unaltered photo and metadata. And, if the image has been altered through a compatible tool, you can easily see each edit/revision to that image, no tech background required!

And great news — Adobe’s Creative Suite and Truepic are already completely interoperable thanks to the C2PA standard, ensuring the world’s most popular image editing software can retain trust markers generated at photo capture — all the way through publishing to you, the viewer.

Architecture

To date, Truepic has used various blockchain technologies to record and preserve the provenance of each media file. Specifically, we have written data to a blockchain, and connected authentication at capture to that chain in a way that shows data integrity and immutability. Thus far, this approach has been successful for our partners. However, as the content provenance industry continues to develop, it’s become clear that blockchain technology won’t power the future of image verification across the internet. Public key Infrastructure (PKI) will.

PKI certificates aren’t new. They’ve long been used for signing PDFs, securing websites through SSL/TLS, and ensuring the integrity of applications in an App Store, all to relay authenticity. In short, it is a tamper-evident “tattoo” or cryptographic watermark digitally stored into the file that, if altered, is immediately detectable as inauthentic. Leaders in the provenance space have come to this conclusion because the PKI system is far more flexible and sustainable when considering the more than one trillion crowdsourced images captured annually. Benefits include:

• Climate — Using PKIs has minimal impact on the environment.
• Connectivity — Relying on PKIs does not require internet connectivity.
• Ease of use — Consumers are more familiar with interacting with certificates (i.e. SSL on websites), vs. blockchain, which still has substantial UI/UX challenges for conveying trust.
• Privacy — PKI eliminates the requirement to share images with the authentication service (Truepic in this case).

Truepic Lens is architected using a PKI system from day one — ensuring maximum security, privacy, reliability, and ease of use.

How can you help?

Want to get your hands dirty? If you are interested in joining our fast growing team — and joining the fight against fraud and disinformation, please visit our careers page. Truepic was just voted one of Built In’s Best Remote Companies to Work For!

If you work actively in this industry, and would like to make contributions, please consider applying to be a member of the C2PA.

And, if you would like to be included in future content authenticity related events, consider joining the Content Authenticity Member Community.

Finally — if you want to stay up to date on Truepic, we just launched a newsletter called “Trusted Future” — which aggregates all of the industry news in one monthly email!

On January 26th, the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) held an important milestone event, releasing Version 1.0 of their open internet specification. During the event, a preview of the technology and open standard was highlighted, with Truepic’s new Lens product as the capture component.