Fingerprinting your camera

Interesting article over at Ars Technica.

All your cameras are belong to us

2700 cameras and they could tell which photo came from which with 100% accuracy. Thats pretty good going.

nice to know! good read

It's also the dust on my sensor. I know of 3 spots on my digital rebel which I can't blow off and potentially they too "fingerprint" the camera.

So what happens when people use things like Noise Ninja and Neat Image? It doesn't seem like a very robust technique to me, sorry.

As the artical points out, any reasonable amount of digital manipulation will remove or distort the noise. However, if you have the original of an image under an ownership dispute, or are trying to prove an image is 'real' being able to show which camera it came from and having more evidence regarding manipulation can certainly be useful.

Indeed, but if you have to keep all your original unedited pictures in order to prove ownership it's going to take up a lot of space on your hard drive and if you shoot raw and keep those files, and only send out jpgs, surely that would be enough?

At least I don't know of any jpeg to raw converters.

You don't keep all your originals? Hard drives are so cheap they are giving them away free in cereal. If you don't at what stage do you decide to get rid of them? When they are 3 months old? a year old? If you only keep post processed versions what happens if you later decide you need a version without whatever processing you did. Cant hit undo 2 weeks later. I wouldn't want to explain to a client why I cant give them the image I shot any longer.

Keeping all the originals is so easy to do, why wouldn't you. You never know when you may need one.