It’s not uncommon to see an image go viral — only to be called out for being fake. News organizations unknowingly published false images of Osama Bin Laden after his death, and there’s always the rounds of fake viral photos that are shared on Facebook and Twitter.
To combat photo falsification, FourandSix technologies introduced izitru, a free photo verification app and website that uses six forensic tests to determine a file’s authenticity. It’s not just looking at the metadata, said FourandSix co-founder Kevin Conner. The tests look at everything from how the file was compressed to what camera was used to whether the file has been re-saved and manipulated.
“Every device and every piece of software has a somewhat different way of storing their JPEG files,” Conner said. “The most significant way that things differ is in the compression settings that the devices use.”
