We’ve all experienced fake news, but we’ve experienced fake pictures a lot longer. These are images that are not what they seem, from minor adjustments to improve the image quality to images depicting something that’s just not true. This becomes a problem in business where image accuracy is required in such areas as contracts, commerce, lawsuits, and communications.
At last a company is addressing this issue. TRUEPIC, a local San Diego company has released the following announcement that describes the product in detail.
TRUEPIC’s enterprise grade photo certification is now available to consumers on both iPhone and Android. Social media influencers, independent beauty professionals, citizen journalists, and others are using TRUEPIC to ensure they’re retaining ownership of content, showcasing work, documenting assets, and more. Simply use TRUEPIC to snap photos & videos and our trusted watermark will be applied to your image and can be instantly share online.
SAN DIEGO, CA–May 11, 2017- In a digital world where seeing isn’t always believing, TRUEPIC today launched a mobile app for businesses and consumers to verify an image’s authenticity. Photos captured with TRUEPIC cannot be altered, filtered or modified in any way, enabling businesses to verify uploaded photos as accurate with 100% confidence, and consumers to share credibly unfiltered pictures anywhere on the web. With well over 1.8 billion smartphone photos uploaded to the internet each day, TRUEPIC’s application can verify images shared on any website enabled with the technology, helping businesses to drive consumer trust and increase revenue. TRUEPIC’s applications include its Image Authenticity Platform for Enterprise, an easy to implement SDK, which can be embedded within any mobile app, as well as a free consumer app, now live in the AppStore and on Google Play.
Photo-sharing is at an all time high, with more than 1.1 trillion photos captured in 2016 and expected to grow to over 1.4 trillion in 2020 but, at the same time, images and videos are no longer trusted as accurate or authentic due to the ubiquity of online & mobile photo editing. As of March 2017, five of the top 10 free photo and video iOS apps are used for editing, modifying and/or filtering images and videos; a ratio that jumps to 9 of the top ten paid apps. As a result, online businesses — from insurance carriers, rental sites and classifieds to dating sites and beauty vendors — must be able to validate shared photos in order to stem the lost revenue bred from fraud and consumer mistrust. Enter TRUEPIC.
TRUEPIC Features include:
- Photo Capturing: Full high quality photo-capturing functionality straight from your device
- Authentication: Patented technology that verifies image has not been altered or edited in any way
- Watermarking: Once authenticated, TRUEPIC time-stamps, geo-codes and validates image with 100% certainty; varying levels of meta data are included on TRUEPIC depending on use case and user: photographer, date, time, device, location where photo are captured, etc.
- Storage: Photos captured with TRUEPIC are assigned a six-digit code and stored in perpetuity in the company’s secure vault; photos are instantly retrievable with the assigned code
- Security: Blockchain technology can be employed in specialized instances to create distributed and immutable copies of the data
- Patented: TRUEPIC holds two patents covering the unique capture and storage of the images
REPRESENTATIVE QUOTES:
“Consumers must have trust in the businesses they choose, which is becoming increasingly difficult given the prevalence of digital photos that are not authentic. Massive credibility and revenue are being lost with each false photo uploaded to online services dealing in home rental, e-commerce, insurance and more,” said Jeffrey Parker, former CEO of Thomson Financial, co-Founder of First Call, and TRUEPIC investor. “And, because TRUEPIC is led by digital experts, the company is well-positioned to help businesses that rely on photos gain the assurances needed to conduct business in a digital age.”
“The authenticity of digital files has historically been vulnerable: files were copied and edited without perfecting their provenance, creating opportunities for piracy, malicious alteration and forgery. Terms like ‘photoshopped’ came to indicate that a resulting image was altered to reflect an alternative reality, making digital files impossible to use in applications that demand the authenticity of images. Registering the original and authentic media to a blockchain, or digital ledger, results in a distributed indisputable database of reference files that makes falsification virtually impossible and the provenance of the images set in stone,” said Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, founder and CEO of Platinum Technology, CEO and founder of SilkRoad Technology, VeriBlock, Fluree, Unocoin and TRUEPIC investor. “At last, the technology exists to assure that the digital world can interact reliably with the physical world, benefiting industries such as insurance, real estate, pharma, security, consumer products, AI, IoT, scientific research and more.”
“Our research shows that people are both overwhelmingly editing photos prior to sharing them online and also highly suspect of photos that are shared by others, causing distrust between consumers and the online businesses they frequent,” said Jeff McGregor, CEO of TRUEPIC. “As the world’s first digital notary for photos, we aim to bring trust and credibility back to digital images.”
“As a longtime entrepreneur, I have seen firsthand how falsified information can impact a business’s bottom line,” said Craig Stack, TRUEPIC founder and finance, restaurant, insurance and technology investor and entrepreneur. “Businesses need a solution to combat the rampant falsification of images online, and consumers want to share authentic photos that others will believe are the real thing. That’s TRUEPIC — we’re truly the anti-filter.”
“There’s no arguing that businesses that operate online need a way to verify images, and TRUEPIC is coming along at precisely the right time,” said Shaun O’Hollaren, COO of BrowGal, a celebrity eyebrow shaping service and makeup line and a TRUEPIC beta customer. “The success or failure of our business hinges on potential customers believing that our products and services will make them look and feel better, rather than just assuming before and after photos have been doctored to sell more. TRUEPIC is truly a third-party sign of approval, giving our customers confidence they need to believe, book and buy.”
