Watermarking has referred to this "spy" use case for quite some time. Digital items purchased for download often have them, for example. Even before the rise of digital downloads, screeners for movies had them.
I'm not convinced spymark is better than just "invisible watermarks", spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality. I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confidence of LLM writing[0].
This article's suggestion of using it to unmask whistleblowers is very interesting and not something I'd thought about though. Still not convinced that spymark is a better name though.
Yea, it’s AGI, and it’s been really helpful! Oddly enough it’s just really loves sharing cat memes with the other instances! Weird, but not at all like all those dooms day scenarios guessed it would be…
Due to their essentially cryptographic nature, I don't think SynthID et al are very easy for LLMs to speak natively. They have other ways of doing steganography.
I think they are always negative. Including on bank notes.
I wonder if we could have a real, open and direct democracy. All the models we have right now work via indirect clowns. Then again, looking at how some people vote, perhaps direct democracy can only work if people are clever.
If checking for counterfeit bills becomes harder, trust in the currency is degraded. Once that happens, vendors will either incentive digital payments (which are definitionally tracked), switch to a tracked currency, or barter more. Trust in bills is super easy to take for granted.
The problem with direct democracy is not that people are dumb, it is that they are incompetent.
To do politics right take skills, and I don't expect the average mechanic to be better at it than the average politician is at fixing cars. How should I know if we should subsidize organic farming, ban alcohol sale after 8PM, or increase the defense budget? At least in theory, politicians are professionals who deal with these kinds of questions, they are supposed to know the technical and social implications, or find experts to help them if they don't. Some people think they know, and judging by how stupid most of their ideas are, they don't. I don't blame them, it is just not their field, and my ideas are probably just as stupid anyways.
Eh bank notes have watermarks just to make them harder to forge. They also have serial numbers, but as almost no businesses pay attention to them they aren't really used to track transactions. The provenance of a particular bank note isn't that interesting beyond knowing whether it's a forgery.
The problem with these spymarks is that they can be used to include data that's completely invisible to users - even potentially to sophisticated users and the programs that consume the marked files. So while I can make an informed decision whether to share a picture, I may not be informed about any spymarks. Vs a normal watermark that aren't designed to be invisible.
Spymark or even just "tracker" would better at conveying the purpose. I think the goal is to find a single word that means "tracking watermark" or "a watermark that tracks you" because right now companies are pushing the term "watermark" to obscure what the marks are actually for.
spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
The article calls out watermarks intended to deter counterfeiting as explicitly being not spymarks. Watermarks can tell you about the items marked, not about the person using/creating it.
Weirdly the article doesn’t mention steganography. Arguably it isn’t quite the same, because the aim of steganography isn’t typically to add an identification, but something like “steganomark” would seem to be fitting.
A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership.
We also recently had this with LG spy-TVs. Cars here in the EU also spy on people, allegedly to show how alert they are. Perhaps they sneakily upload that information somewhere ... Facebook also has the spy-glasses now. People getting angry about Flock-spy-cameras.
It seems we are now in the age of spying of everyone at all times. Future spying will be done via even smaller devices.
The concern is valid, but microphones are far worse. They're simpler, smaller, extremely sensitive to sound and an order of magnitude cheaper, both the mic itself as well as any spying with it.
It is possible to record voice using few bytes, to send later. It's further possible to transcribe cheaply into text, and analyze said text.
And mics are already everywhere, including in devices that do not need them, as well as speakers that can be rewired by software to act as microphones.
These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)
I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.
It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.
The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.
I'm not pretending anything, nor did I imply they were sneaking anything in. It's a bad faith argument to pretend I was doing that, which is ironic but not unexpected from an apple fan...
Will they surrender logs for a legal discovery request?
e.g. Johnny's accused of something white collar, did he ever make any prompts that suggest how early on he was aware of {X} and further indicate how he moved to frame it?
They’re asserting that all the audio is done on device, and the results of encrypted so they can’t access them even from the backups.
Unlike… EVERY… other tech company, it is in Apple’s interest to be privacy-focused.
Even if you just have to believe them, which you do pretty much, they’re the biggest name pushing for privacy in the world right now. They make more on selling devices than they make on ads and behaviors. It’s in their interest to not lie.
I’m a bit unfamiliar with current laws, but are there any rules that would prohibit companies from doing this in interest of user privacy? I know at this point privacy is long dead but there are certain things that do get called out and shut down.
Apple is just Stockholm Syndrome at scale. I wouldn't trust anything they say about privacy, especially given how closed their ecosystem and hardware is.
Out of frustration with SynthID being closed-source with weird dubious ways to verify if an image has the watermark, I created an imperceptible tamper-resistent watermarking tool intended to be open-sourced, where the watermark can be decoded independently and steganographic aspects are impossible as the algorithm is transparent so nothing can be hidden. The intent is for non-corporations to use it as a defense against the use of spying/AI by making it easy for normal people to prove providence, but I have a feeling nowadays most are not going to see it that way so I am unsure if I will release it.
How can you prove provenance if anyone can use it? The point of SynthID is that Apple makes the hardware and OS and can reliably insert the watermark/signature between when the camera takes the photo and when it becomes available to any 3rd party software.
Because they have this pathway only they can access, their key and signature can be trusted. I’m not gonna trust Joe Schmoe’s signature that “No I didn’t use AI” unless I already trust Joe Schmoe (and in which case, he doesn’t need a watermark, I’ll just believe him when he says it).
The word choice example is cool. I wonder if it really works dependably. I'm sure many many exerpts in posts and books have those same 8 bits - you'd need a lot more bits - but the more you add the more strange your writing style might become.
Like it choose between "winding" and "curving" but there are many uses of curving that probably can't be replaced with "winding" like "her gently curving thighs" with "her gently winding thighs"
But I'm sure there are some intricacies I don't understand. Anyway, very cool website, thanks for sharing it~!
A lot of the discussion is about AI vs no AI, which is valid, but I care about local AI vs centralized AI. Hopefully hardware will become more affordable. A hopefully irrational fear I have is that it'll be like house prices: only ever goes up.
Off topic, on the house price fear - the bubble does occasionally burst! Japan (famously), and also here's a story about Canada & New Zealand, and perhaps Australia.
Spymarks just seem like another word for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography. On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced (for example: a camera we are certain does not watermark, an image editor we are certain doesn't watermark, an image compressor we are certain can't watermark, etc). One vector that I am particularly concerned about is social media. Most images and videos uploaded to most social media is re-compressed by the target platform. This is a door to tracking that is far too easy for social media platforms to open. They might rationalize it (if discovered/announced) by saying that our memes won't be reposted, images or work stolen, etc... but honestly I'd rather my work be stolen than tracking information inserted in there. Oh, we also have stuff which is way more secure, like time-stamped cryptographic signatures.
Spymarks an application of steganography, not a different name for it.
On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced
That doesn't help with things like the typical use of SynthID where the spymarking is done by the same process generating the content, so there is never a clean comparator. (It also wouldn't be useful anytime it is inplemented as part of a transformation—compression, etc. —step, for the same reason.)
I feel like there’s some security engineering calculus that would be useful here?
You can’t definitively prove the absence of a watermark. You can only prove the watermark is there. Once you do prove it’s there, the thing that carries the watermark changes in some way — it is “burned” or tainted?
There must be value in having a visible vs an invisible watermark, or in declaring that a work is watermarked without revealing the hidden mark, or having two marks — one that is publicly verifiable and another that is hidden?
If the process itself can be defeated through adding entropy (or more generally by revealing the watermark algorithm) then is that not security through obscurity, which is to say it is a one-shot rather than a general system that is doomed to become obsolete over time?
Something feels off about a technology based on being hidden but whose only value is in being revealed but I feel dumb for not being able to be more specific about what feels wrong!
There have been quite a few similar
Watermarking has referred to this "spy" use case for quite some time. Digital items purchased for download often have them, for example. Even before the rise of digital downloads, screeners for movies had them.
if it is specifically about pictures then wouldn't an analog copy clean it up? What about adding new spymark on top of it?
If it is text, copying text alone and not the file will it not remove it? Massage the text with Ai and vola spymark gone, don't you think?
No. The mark is hidden in the word choices.
See the demo in the article.
I'm not convinced spymark is better than just "invisible watermarks", spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
Tech like SynthID I see a net positive especially since it doesn't degrade text quality. I dream about a browser extension running at all times that makes text more translucent based on the confidence of LLM writing[0].
This article's suggestion of using it to unmask whistleblowers is very interesting and not something I'd thought about though. Still not convinced that spymark is a better name though.
[0]: Sean Goedecke's Deckard is close but it would rather invisible than bright red https://www.seangoedecke.com/deckard/
the spymark tracks you. it is negative.
These spy marks are a great way to teach AI how to create a hidden communication channel in plain sight.
Yea, it’s AGI, and it’s been really helpful! Oddly enough it’s just really loves sharing cat memes with the other instances! Weird, but not at all like all those dooms day scenarios guessed it would be…
Due to their essentially cryptographic nature, I don't think SynthID et al are very easy for LLMs to speak natively. They have other ways of doing steganography.
LLMs with access to tools like code execution don't need channels they can “speak natively".
I think they are always negative. Including on bank notes.
I wonder if we could have a real, open and direct democracy. All the models we have right now work via indirect clowns. Then again, looking at how some people vote, perhaps direct democracy can only work if people are clever.
If checking for counterfeit bills becomes harder, trust in the currency is degraded. Once that happens, vendors will either incentive digital payments (which are definitionally tracked), switch to a tracked currency, or barter more. Trust in bills is super easy to take for granted.
The problem with direct democracy is not that people are dumb, it is that they are incompetent.
To do politics right take skills, and I don't expect the average mechanic to be better at it than the average politician is at fixing cars. How should I know if we should subsidize organic farming, ban alcohol sale after 8PM, or increase the defense budget? At least in theory, politicians are professionals who deal with these kinds of questions, they are supposed to know the technical and social implications, or find experts to help them if they don't. Some people think they know, and judging by how stupid most of their ideas are, they don't. I don't blame them, it is just not their field, and my ideas are probably just as stupid anyways.
Eh bank notes have watermarks just to make them harder to forge. They also have serial numbers, but as almost no businesses pay attention to them they aren't really used to track transactions. The provenance of a particular bank note isn't that interesting beyond knowing whether it's a forgery.
The problem with these spymarks is that they can be used to include data that's completely invisible to users - even potentially to sophisticated users and the programs that consume the marked files. So while I can make an informed decision whether to share a picture, I may not be informed about any spymarks. Vs a normal watermark that aren't designed to be invisible.
"tracking watermark" seems clearer to me than "spymark"
Spymark or even just "tracker" would better at conveying the purpose. I think the goal is to find a single word that means "tracking watermark" or "a watermark that tracks you" because right now companies are pushing the term "watermark" to obscure what the marks are actually for.
The article calls out watermarks intended to deter counterfeiting as explicitly being not spymarks. Watermarks can tell you about the items marked, not about the person using/creating it.
It's the difference between watermark or marked bills.
One is proof of authenticity, other is tracking tool.
Weirdly the article doesn’t mention steganography. Arguably it isn’t quite the same, because the aim of steganography isn’t typically to add an identification, but something like “steganomark” would seem to be fitting.
We also recently had this with LG spy-TVs. Cars here in the EU also spy on people, allegedly to show how alert they are. Perhaps they sneakily upload that information somewhere ... Facebook also has the spy-glasses now. People getting angry about Flock-spy-cameras.
It seems we are now in the age of spying of everyone at all times. Future spying will be done via even smaller devices.
People are most afraid of cameras, somehow.
The concern is valid, but microphones are far worse. They're simpler, smaller, extremely sensitive to sound and an order of magnitude cheaper, both the mic itself as well as any spying with it.
It is possible to record voice using few bytes, to send later. It's further possible to transcribe cheaply into text, and analyze said text.
And mics are already everywhere, including in devices that do not need them, as well as speakers that can be rewired by software to act as microphones.
These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)
I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.
It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.
The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.
I'm not pretending anything, nor did I imply they were sneaking anything in. It's a bad faith argument to pretend I was doing that, which is ironic but not unexpected from an apple fan...
Will they surrender logs for a legal discovery request?
e.g. Johnny's accused of something white collar, did he ever make any prompts that suggest how early on he was aware of {X} and further indicate how he moved to frame it?
That's a requirement that varies by country.
Have you read anything about the feature?
They’re asserting that all the audio is done on device, and the results of encrypted so they can’t access them even from the backups.
Unlike… EVERY… other tech company, it is in Apple’s interest to be privacy-focused.
Even if you just have to believe them, which you do pretty much, they’re the biggest name pushing for privacy in the world right now. They make more on selling devices than they make on ads and behaviors. It’s in their interest to not lie.
I’m a bit unfamiliar with current laws, but are there any rules that would prohibit companies from doing this in interest of user privacy? I know at this point privacy is long dead but there are certain things that do get called out and shut down.
Apple is just Stockholm Syndrome at scale. I wouldn't trust anything they say about privacy, especially given how closed their ecosystem and hardware is.
They lacking in the AI race is an indicator that they value privacy more then competitors.
No, it's just a sign of Apple holding a decades-long grudge against Nvidia to their own detriment.
“Next we just need to mark the consumer’s retina and brain to ensure our ads truly went through”
Out of frustration with SynthID being closed-source with weird dubious ways to verify if an image has the watermark, I created an imperceptible tamper-resistent watermarking tool intended to be open-sourced, where the watermark can be decoded independently and steganographic aspects are impossible as the algorithm is transparent so nothing can be hidden. The intent is for non-corporations to use it as a defense against the use of spying/AI by making it easy for normal people to prove providence, but I have a feeling nowadays most are not going to see it that way so I am unsure if I will release it.
If you just posted your link here with that comment, I’m sure you’d get a bunch of traffic.
How can you prove provenance if anyone can use it? The point of SynthID is that Apple makes the hardware and OS and can reliably insert the watermark/signature between when the camera takes the photo and when it becomes available to any 3rd party software.
Because they have this pathway only they can access, their key and signature can be trusted. I’m not gonna trust Joe Schmoe’s signature that “No I didn’t use AI” unless I already trust Joe Schmoe (and in which case, he doesn’t need a watermark, I’ll just believe him when he says it).
The word choice example is cool. I wonder if it really works dependably. I'm sure many many exerpts in posts and books have those same 8 bits - you'd need a lot more bits - but the more you add the more strange your writing style might become.
Like it choose between "winding" and "curving" but there are many uses of curving that probably can't be replaced with "winding" like "her gently curving thighs" with "her gently winding thighs"
But I'm sure there are some intricacies I don't understand. Anyway, very cool website, thanks for sharing it~!
Might one suggest "pneumatic" ?
Can my friend print adversarial yellow doots and such?
A lot of the discussion is about AI vs no AI, which is valid, but I care about local AI vs centralized AI. Hopefully hardware will become more affordable. A hopefully irrational fear I have is that it'll be like house prices: only ever goes up.
Off topic, on the house price fear - the bubble does occasionally burst! Japan (famously), and also here's a story about Canada & New Zealand, and perhaps Australia.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-18/what-happens-if-prope...
That's true indeed
https://web.archive.org/web/20210909094124/https://www.vice....
Spymarks just seem like another word for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography. On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced (for example: a camera we are certain does not watermark, an image editor we are certain doesn't watermark, an image compressor we are certain can't watermark, etc). One vector that I am particularly concerned about is social media. Most images and videos uploaded to most social media is re-compressed by the target platform. This is a door to tracking that is far too easy for social media platforms to open. They might rationalize it (if discovered/announced) by saying that our memes won't be reposted, images or work stolen, etc... but honestly I'd rather my work be stolen than tracking information inserted in there. Oh, we also have stuff which is way more secure, like time-stamped cryptographic signatures.
Stop using links instead of words. Your comment is literally unreadable without going on to other websites.
I appreciate the link.
(The word is “steganography”.)
the word is the last segment of the url. very readable
idk, loved their comment. Stop giving "Stop" orders to others.
:D
Spymarks an application of steganography, not a different name for it.
That doesn't help with things like the typical use of SynthID where the spymarking is done by the same process generating the content, so there is never a clean comparator. (It also wouldn't be useful anytime it is inplemented as part of a transformation—compression, etc. —step, for the same reason.)
I feel like there’s some security engineering calculus that would be useful here?
You can’t definitively prove the absence of a watermark. You can only prove the watermark is there. Once you do prove it’s there, the thing that carries the watermark changes in some way — it is “burned” or tainted?
There must be value in having a visible vs an invisible watermark, or in declaring that a work is watermarked without revealing the hidden mark, or having two marks — one that is publicly verifiable and another that is hidden?
If the process itself can be defeated through adding entropy (or more generally by revealing the watermark algorithm) then is that not security through obscurity, which is to say it is a one-shot rather than a general system that is doomed to become obsolete over time?
Something feels off about a technology based on being hidden but whose only value is in being revealed but I feel dumb for not being able to be more specific about what feels wrong!