[Ssc-dev] "Tracking with metadata: It's not all bad"

[Nathan of Guardian]

http://www.cio.com/article/749280/Tracking_with_metadata_It_39_s_not_all_bad?taxonomyId=3089

Tracking with metadata: It's not all bad
Human rights groups are using metadata to verify the authenticity of
eyewitness footage

Add a comment By Zach Miners
Wed, March 05, 2014

IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau) — Metadata has had a bad rap
lately, with disclosures tying its collection to government spying
programs. But those bits of information lurking behind our phone calls,
photos and online chats can be useful in other ways if they're harnessed
properly.
Metadata that reveals when and where photos and videos were taken can
help establish trust in eyewitness footage documenting events as they
unfold. Without it, establishing what's real and what's not can be hard,
if not impossible.
How do news organizations determine which bystander's footage is
legitimate before they show it on the nightly news? How do attorneys
find the most reliable footage of an assault to build a case?
"There's something powerful in people's capacity to use the devices in
their pockets to document what's around them, but there's a frustrating
gap between that and accountability," said Sam Gregory, program director
at the nonprofit group Witness, during a panel this week at RightsCon, a
conference on digital rights and the open Internet.
Witness was founded in 1992 after the Rodney King, Jr. beating, which
was videotaped by a bystander. The group aims to further the use of
video as a tool for human rights campaigns, partly by better verifying
its authenticity through metadata.
Metadata, the group argues, can enable greater verification and trust
and enhance data mapping. From Syria alone, the group says, there are
more than 500,000 videos online that could provide documentation for
human rights violations, but many are not sourced to an identifiable
creator.
One of the projects Witness is involved with is a mobile app developed
in collaboration with the Guardian Project. Called InformaCam, it uses
the smartphone's built-in sensors to validate the date, time and
location of capture.
The app uses digital signatures and encryption to try to ensure media
hasn't been tampered with, and it wants similar capabilities to be
offered natively in other camera apps and in key platforms for
distributing photos and video such as YouTube, Google+ and Facebook.
The group has pushed for an opt-in "eye witness" or "proof" mode that
users could select before creating or sharing media files. On capture,
the mode would incorporate and preserve rich metadata, perhaps using the
J3M standard, providing a way to check file integrity. Or there may need
to be a way of confirming that the data in a video was captured with an
app that meets certain verification standards, Witness has said.
They're lofty goals, and Witness and the Guardian Project acknowledge
they face an uphill battle. Challenges include an increasing discomfort
with metadata, as more documents are leaked showing governments' use of
it for surveillance.
There are concerns the groups' sensor technologies, which can locate
nearby cellphone towers and Bluetooth addresses, might work too well,
and pick up information about people who don't want to be included in an
analysis. "Accepted social norms in one region may not be acceptable
elsewhere," said Nathan Freitas, founder of the Guardian Project.
Still, metadata offers unique opportunities from a human rights
perspective. "It's all there anyway," Freitas said, "so why don't we use
it for something other than tracking us down?"
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news
for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's
e-mail address is zach_miners at idg.com