Thread

1. tgsovlerkhgsel · 1789535685 · focus · HN ↗

   This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps, and has the potential to shift from "you need a smartphone to be able to live normally" to "you need an iPhone to be able to live normally".

   There are already plenty of insurances that require you to submit claims through a smartphone app that tries to essentially do this by capturing sensor metadata etc. - those don't need to be nation-state resilient, just Joe the Crackhead Insurance Scammer resilient, so this works. Likewise, more and more things online require identity verification (either officially or disguised as age verification).

   Edit: And while "a nation state actor can spoof this" is a problem for the journalism use case, the insurance/ID verification use cases are perfectly fine with anything that raises the bar but could be bypassed with enough effort. Also, the journalism use case suffers from the same fundamental issue all of these use cases suffer from: People will "verify" the picture by looking at the repost of a screenshot of the verification UI, not by verifying the original themselves.

   1. FireBeyond · 1789568484 · focus · HN ↗

      > This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps

      This is definitely not an Apple thing, though the use profile is more ubiquitous. Canon had, more than twenty years ago, when they first started making DSLRs, the question of "If we want law enforcement to use these, how do we handle the inevitable questions?" and as a result built out the option to digitally sign the raw sensor data in-camera so the raw file could be pointed to in court with an attestation of image integrity.

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