I never asked them to waste additional resources by injecting my blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article from that.
But here I am, with (elder) relatives sending me Google search-results on topics like they are proper articles...
> blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article
For quick reference, sometimes it’s pretty good! The problem is that obviously you can’t dedicate a lot of compute or additional tools for checking those answers so most of it can’t really be trusted.
Not mention that this changes how information is found and how it is created.
The sometimes convenience comes alongside ejecting society from the previous system of figuring out what is true and false.
That was a system that was already failing, but we may have gotten on top of. Now we have one that is simply alien and inimical to any human scale solutions to staying ahead of it.
Generation capacity simply outstrips verification capacity, and with search summaries taking over links to the actual sites, the funding/incentives to run sites and publish content is removed.
The curtain call of the era of the open internet, and the opening act of the LLM mediated web, isn’t a show I am excited to have front row seats to.
It’s a “solved” problem. On more dubious topics, “proper articles” these days also more often than not come from AI clusters, so you might as well just read the Google one.
I'm allowing that there is a delay between selling ads and the rising tide of SEO enshitification that follows. Money is still at the root of the decline of the internet.
Somehow reminds me of the journalist who convinced LLMs to consider him a "sausage eating champion" with just 20 minutes of work [0].
Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there, e.g. "Nutris(c) is proven to be better than caffeine for haircare"
I wonder how well a company could establish something like Danone's health-claim for Activia [1] in an AI without ever being clearly accountable for it...
I seem to recall headlines about Russia infecting AIs with propaganda, one or two years ago.
I don't remember actually reading the article, so I have no idea how serious that was, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't being studied actively by all major countries already. And that may be one of the core reasons for the China vs US AI competition.
Israel also did so. But most of it seems to get filtered out pretty well. the Sausage eating was possible due to lack of material existing in this topic area.
> "the Sausage eating was possible due to lack of material existing in this topic area."
Which makes it perfect for companies to create an area where they own the majority of material, and "have the AI talk for them".
e.g. how Philip Morris defined their e-cig "Heets" as a separate product to (e-)cigarettes because it doesn't burn tobacco but only "heats" it. It's now a separate domain with the majority of material (including the term "heets") owned by Philip Morris.
i am terrified of the nudging that is/might be already happening in the consumer context.
Cambridge analytica showed us what is possible when you just shift the things people see, imagine what is possible when you shift what their personal assistant tells them.
Regarding the first linked article: wouldn't it be the same with no AI in sight? I suppose most people, when they'd stumbled upon a blog written by "a senior technology journalist at the BBC", would believe in the sausage eating championship too.
To be clear: I totally agree that manipulating LLMs is super-dangerous. I don't think it is a 20 minutes of work, though. It's more like "years of building credibility, and then 20 minutes of work".
> "And when you do find a PDF claiming something malicious, [..] it’s always a ‘new’ PDF, which is forthright about it being a new unpublished ‘white paper’ or somesuch, and doesn’t purport to be a published paper."
> "Whereas, if you were so epistemically careless with images on, say, Facebook, you would wind up with a folder stuffed full of lying images which have been Photoshopped, claimed to be things other than what they are, ‘deep faked’, etc"
Maybe because a paper is a comprehending medium, expecting the reader to understand its source and interpret the content on a more intellectual level, whereas effective images/videos are usually framed to be understood immediately.
i.e. if I want to convince people that lizard-people live among us and I want to manufacture proof, my demographic probably responds more to images with a lizard than a reinterpreted academic paper...
DXOMARK sells test equipment and consulting services for (among others) camera tuning.
Naturally, they won't attack the image quality of a customer who purchased their test equipment and/or consulting service (usually not publicly known who did that), so they often tone down some of their statements when they review a device (and shift the attention to other areas).
Always interesting to check out the scores of DXOMARK competitors in parallel, e.g. VCX[0] which strives for an objective scoring scheme (but didn't test the device yet, indicating that they at least didn't have an early sample)
I don't know about smartphone sensors, but the DXOMARK sensor ratings for full-frame digital cameras largely mirror my own experience with them, so at least there they seem to be a fair judge.
I agree, but for this to matter, a critical amount of fraud should be based on people uploading modified photos of ID's.
If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.
It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.
To me the weakest spot of this whole endeavor is how this will create false confidence in a story just because the accompanying images pass Apple's verification.
Like with the Watch Ultra (attacking the diving-watch market with the sheer volume-scale of selling the development to everyone buying a Watch Ultra), Apple is attacking the trusted-imaging market with the same strategy.
Okay, fine. Will work for sure, this will disrupt the trusted-imaging market and moreover make Apple a service-provider in this industry (with the ramp-up cost paid by customers buying iPhones for entirely different purposes).
But creating this impression and media-buzz that Apple is now verifying more than just the digital authenticity of an image may shift the public scrutiny of MANY media/online statements:
There is a risk that random claims (and propaganda) will be given more credibility in the public eye just because they came with images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"
> images that were confirmed to be "taken like this on an iPhone"
No, because images will be confirmed to have been taken on "this iPhone". The New York Times will be able to publish an article and to attest that the photographs shown were taken by their journalists, and then your user agent will verify that provenience.
I think it's great for journalists and journalism because maybe people will stop paying attention to crap on social media, which won't have such verification, and they'll be instead looking at legit journalism.
Not the OP, but yes, other vendors will be able to support that as well. But a camera sensor that has
1. a public/private key exchanged during device-production (production-cost),
2. the capability to reboot in a cryptographic mode (R&D / component cost) and
3. a cloud-service which then processes the raw data to create a JPG (operational cost)
comes at a premium. Why should this premium be applied on a 99 USD Smartphone?
Which is my whole puzzle on this vector: If the big benefit is for insurance/ID-verification, which apply cost-saving by offloading their process to the untrusted customer, how much they can offload this by requiring their customer to own a 1000+ USD smartphone to provide THEIR service...?
The most I can imagine is insurances offloading their work to OTHER companies, NOT trusting them and therefore requiring them to own a 1000+ USD Smartphone. But even then, why not use a third party app that also runs on a 3y old iPhone and a 99 USD Android device...?
We have 99USD smartphones with 1080p+ AMOLEDs, massive 5k amp batteries and very performant SOCs (e.g. Galaxy A16) among other costly, but not vital niceties. I struggle to see how cost could be a factor here.
> I struggle to see how cost could be a factor here.
Okay. In good faith, I'll go with you:
If COST is not a factor, why does the Galaxy A16 still have no OIS (Optical Image Stabilization)?
Unlike this trusted-imaging service, OIS would be a feature for increased user-experience which is highly-matured and exists in Smartphones since 2013.
The answer is COST: A camera-module with OIS is a more-expensive component than a module without it.
And that's ONLY the component-cost: A OIS-camera doesn't come with increased cost in device-production (it's just another component to place and assemble), no increased cost in R&D (the tech is very mature, all the SW is there) and no running costs (there are no cloud-services required to operate OIS)
Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly half and thus take some significant engineering and design cost to accommodate? At least it seems that way in the phones I've taken apart and looked at.
Also, OIS is a major mechanical add on (a literal motor) and even 1500usd smartphones lack it on some of their sensors, mainly because while it can have an advantage on an ultrawide, that tends to be more limited. Incidentally, most 99usd phones have one (actually usable) sensor which thus tends to have a larger width to compensate. I hope, in good faith, you see the difference, to something like ARI.
AMOLED, etc. are also a bit more expensive then OIS, but we get those into a sub 100usd BOM easily somehow. More so for 5g, certain features just become expected/required.
Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the high-end but quickly became required and essentially free to implement.
Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.
To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why do most new smartphone at 99usd include some form of an NPU? Or the trusted modules for biometrics, etc.?
>Doesn't OIS increase the size of a sensor by roughly half
No, you can apply smartphone OIS-tech on any sensor, stabilization is achieved via the lens-array, not the sensor. The size of the module slightly increases but that's not a hindering factor. Cost/Benefit of OIS on ultra-wide lenses is not there, so it's usually not applied.
>Your logic would lead to OEMs making SOCs without things like TEE and other things which started in the highend but quickly became required for one and basically free to implement for two.
TEE became a mandatory requirement of the media industry for Smartphones in ~2010, as they announced plans to restrict media-playback on a device without measures to secure the DRM-keys. Google made it mandatory shortly after, because the entire ecosystem was built on media-consumption.
It didn't come for free to the players in the industry, it became a very expensive task to develop, support and maintain it, but that's another story.
Drawing a parallel here, I fail to see who should require cryptographic authentication of a taken image from end-user devices, to the point that no consumer devices without it will be built anymore.
>Not saying it is free now, but that the upcoming gen of chips from Sony, Samsung, etc. will have it build in for such a minimal BOM impact, this will be an expected, common place feature across all prices.
It will be supported in sensors for sure, but those will be premium-tier sensors, as a differentiation factor. Until today there was no premium sensor used in mass-tier devices.
Of course, again, if there is demand in the market or a regulation requiring it, it will create an incentive for the industry to follow, but I fail to see why either of this should happen in the coming years.
>To have a more serious, honest and accurate comparison than OIS, why can you not buy a single new smartphone at any price without some NPU?
I don't know why OIS is not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, can you elaborate?
As stated, it's a highly mature technology available for over a decade already, providing critical-mass observable end-user value, yet it didn't just naturally "trickle down" to every smartphone price-segment, simply because it comes with additional cost no matter which scale (and the Galaxy A1x tier has massive scale).
A NPU is just the evolution of a DSP, which exists in Smartphone SoC's for more than a decade now and is required for Audio and Image processing. DSP's used to run pre-calculated inference models for lens-correction, exposure, white-balance, etc., now these processes can run as models on an NPU.
---
You are trying to argue why that feature won't naturally become a commodity at basically no cost. I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.
The market doesn't get features as a default "easily somehow", features reach this commodity stage because of significant end-user demand (like Camera, Display, Battery), business-value (for the vendor, like Apple Pay) or industry-requirements (like TEE, Widevine example above).
I don't see this happen for this feature, because there is
1. no significant end-user value (unless the public narrative is massively skewed towards "everything is true when the image was signed"),
2. the business-value applies only for Apple's service-proposition for now (which will likely make this feature expand to the non-Pro iPhone tier), and for
3. the industry-requirement I don't see WHO would actually be able to enforce this, for WHICH actual benefit.
> I'm trying to answer why I don't see this happen, because I worked in this industry for more than 20 years.
And despite that experience, you do not see the universal value in reliable, verifiable image attestation for any user? You cannot imagine why that may not just be very useful, but quickly become required, what the "end-user demand", "business-value" or "industry-requirements" could be?
This is not what I wrote and a very bad-faith statement of yours.
There is universal value in many features, yet they didn't become a commodity in all smartphone-tiers.
I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones, which you keep insisting on without apparently comprehending the industry and market aspects I am trying to explain.
What? Those three sentences are not really compatible with each other?! Like, they are mutually exclusive and each appears to hold a different position.
How is what I wrote (that you seem to not see universal benefit) in bad-faith/not what you wrote (honestly trying to understand what you mean) if you then add:
> I don't see how and why this feature should become a default in all smartphones [...]
So, do you see universal value or not? Cause you again said you do not and that was precisely what I wrote, that you do not seem to despite it being obvious to anyone who thinks about why phones of any price have cameras.
Should I honestly start writing a list why private as well as business users of smartphones may want, even need this? Is that really required? Consider every use case of a camera on a phone, please, before I feel the need to do that.
You fail to understand the difference between a feature having perceived "universal value" and that same feature being applied universally in all price-segments of a device. These are, and I cannot overemphasize this, two different things!
You stated that you "struggle to see how cost could be a factor here", so in good faith I was trying to give you an insight.
There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.
So you wanted to shift the conversation, claiming that it's not a "serious, honest and accurate" comparison, without providing any reasons for that.
Again, I walk with you, I respond to what you're stating.
Now it ends with you starting the straw-man argument of how obviously great this feature is and asking how despite all experience I am not capable to see that.
See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.
You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith. That's why our talk ends here. I give you my side of this conversation so you may read and grow from it, but this is entirely up to you.
P.S.: You also seem to misunderstand what this feature is. It's NOT picture attestation as you put it.
Picture attestation means an entity confirms the connection of a picture to something else (some "metadata"), e.g. a picture of a person to an identity (Name, ID,...) or a place. This attestation party can either be a person (self-attested) or an official entity (e.g. a government).
Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.
>There is universal value in OIS, as everyone takes pictures while holding the device in his hands, yet OIS is not applied universally in all price-tiers of devices. The reason is COST.
The reason is digital stabilization is a good enough alternative to not bother, and the lens/sensor modules they use in bulk just didn't come with "analog" stabilization. And OIS is way less important than a future digitally verified photos feature could be (which could be mandated by corporations, banks, governments, insurance companies, for several uses when it becomes widespread), so they didn't bother to add it.
All kinds of cheapo smartphones still manage to have OIS, just because some Samsung models don't doesn't mean it's a universal argument for cheap phones in general.
>Nothing in this process changes with this Apple feature, because all it can do is confirm that the picture was taken by the camera as-is, but the attestation to the external metadata (WHO this is, WHAT this is, WHERE this is) still needs to be done by someone else. A party trusted enough to vouch for this.
Moot point, since the entity (e.g. gov) asking for an untampered photo (which this can do), can combine the photo with the metadata from the upload, like your gov mobile app account.
> See, it doesn't matter if _I_ see universal value in this feature or not, the topic was why I consider it unlikely to become a commodity.
> You tried to move the conversation to this straw-man argument, and doing so in bad-faith [...]
What? This entire conversation started with the assumption being made that this was going to be iPhone exclusive. I stated doubt and then you (re-read to verify cause you seem to have forgotten that) out of left field and for no discernible reason felt the need to move the conversation to the only massive straw man in this interaction, the 99usd phone market.
I personally still believe that this is going to be a universal feature soon enough (wait to hear from Omnivision, etc.) and stand by that. This is my personal assessment due to the objective need for such features in the world we live in today. I may be wrong on this, we will see. Maybe it will be restricted to the higher end Android phones, but that would still be compatible with what I started out saying.
I shouldn't have engaged with someone so serious that they must drag "why couldn't Android OEMs in general do the same" (a purely technical question) down to "99 USD Smartphone" and "premium" on those (an odd and empty pivot). Anyone who does such a shift, well, they must have a well founded, serious point to make.
How many smartphones have no camera? Zero? Bluetooth? Zero? But they could save cost by not having those. I think they are basically table stakes. If this type of thing becomes required for more and more things then no one will buy a phone that doesn't have them.
Yes, the whole insurance self-service is built on smartphones having a camera.
But the assumption that smartphone cameras, including those used in 99USD smartphones, will become 100% cryptographic cameras in a few years is highly unlikely, considering that those cameras didn't even gain OIS in the last 13 years despite the feature being highly matured and widely available.
Changing the topic to other features won't change that.
You seem to lack the understanding how this industry works, and assume that every development naturally just trickles down and becomes a commodity. This is not the case.
This cryptographic feature will definitely become available from camera sensor suppliers, first of all likely from Sony. But it will be a feature of premium sensors and will remain a differentiation factor.
Sony will not support cryptography to its sensors without additional cost. Device-vendors integrating those sensors then have additional cost in R&D, production AND operations. All this will not be waived and put in a 99USD device.
For the other assumption, that "If this type of thing becomes required", I fail to see how this should happen for a mass-market consumer: This feature doesn't authenticate the content of an image, it just authenticates the RAW data of the image sensor.
It won't (and shouldn't!) make the user more trusted towards another entity (like Apple mentions themselves in the link)
>But the assumption that smartphone cameras, including those used in 99USD smartphones, will become 100% cryptographic cameras in a few years is highly unlikely, considering that those cameras didn't even gain OIS in the last 13 years despite the feature being highly matured and widely available.
Them becoming 70% cryptographic is enough. The people who need the feature, can get a compatible model. Nobody argued that smartphones sold for kids to game on for example should have it.
1. OIS (optical stabilization) ensures that the light photons consistently hit the same pixel, removing the blur caused by camera-shake during exposure.
2. EIS (electrical stabilization) via cropping compensates camera-shake on video(!) recording by applying the same shake to the crop-canvas within the frame.
--> EIS can fix a shaky video but not a blurry photo.
It's 2026, with cleaner high ISOs even in phone sized sensors giving the ability to raise the shutter speed as needed, we hadn't had much of an issue with blurry photos for a decade now, with or without OIS. There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2).
It's video where people care about these days. Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?
Might be boring, but in 2026 "clean high ISOs" in phone-sized sensors mainly comes from image post-processing (stuff like multi-frame merging is done even when shooting "RAW"). Post-processing requires a stable (albeit noisy) image, otherwise it'll be garbage-in/garbage-out.
--> OIS actually became MORE important for Smartphones in the past years, because while post-processing produces better and better results, it massively depends on usable input data. OIS is one of the very few methods to improve the INPUT-quality for post-processing.
>"There have been several expensive cameras with no OIS, like Ricoh GR and (and v2), or ZVE10 (and v2)."
That's a apples and oranges comparison. A quick Google search tells me the size of a pixel on the Ricoh GR sensor is 4.81 µm, which is ~8 times larger than the pixel in recent smartphones (~0,6µm). It is not only physically capable to capture 8x more light, it is also much less affected by minor shaking than sensors with smaller pixel-sizes.
>"Does anybody complain about blurry S12 photos?"
Not sure what's a "S12", but:
- On flagship phones with OIS: Not so much. Maybe in low-light scenarios, because, you know, not much light...
- On cheaper devices without OIS: Yes! Oh yes, constantly.
People assume that the picture-quality of a e.g. 2026 Galaxy A16 must be comparable or better than the picture of a 8-year old Galaxy S9. It's not, the S9 is still better in everyday shooting.
Just check user-reviews of mass-tier smartphones without OIS, like Samsung Galaxy A series...
Well, that happened because in ~2011 the entire media industry announced that they will stop media playback on devices which didn't secure the DRM-keys.
As media consumption was fundamental to the Smartphone ecosystem, Google made secure-boot and widevine mandatory.
Sure, the same could happen here, but I don't know which industry (or other body) would demand that and have sufficient justification for it.
After all, the feature doesn't really change that much for a consumer, the trust-chain is largely unchanged: If I send you a picture and tell you that's my dog, you still have to take my word for it, regardless whether Apple signed the picture or not.
> comes at a premium. Why should this premium be applied on a 99 USD Smartphone?
It's entirely software. It's R&D cost, with basically none of it in hardware (you technically just need the private key store which even very cheap devices have)
An insurance would either assign #1 an insurance agent or mechanic to initially assess the damage (trusted) or #2 ask the customer to send pictures (untrusted).
Tendency is #2 for cost-saving of the insurance, and 3rd party apps are used to execute this.
Now the idea is that the insurance company discontinues the App and the (untrusted) customer must have an iPhone 18 Pro to make an insurance claim?
Or is the insurance agent / mechanic an untrusted entity who will now be required to have an iPhone 18 Pro?
What is the fraud vector here, and how can the insurance service provider continue cost-saving on damage-assessment by offloading to the customer, if the customer is required to own a specific device?
So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
And then stop the 3rd party app which is vendor-agnostic and works on all devices?
I'd say that's unlikely.
IF that's an industry this Apple-feature will disrupt, it seems it will barely have an impact on the process of insurance companies themselves, but will actually disrupt the service-provider industry FOR insurances:
The insurance won't be able to stop their existing 3rd party cost-saving, as it provides the largest device-coverage for offloading to the customer.
Instead, either the insurance or the 3rd party service-provider will have to pay Apple in addition to make use of this feature, with the hopes that the provided data will reduce fraud.
Which brings me back to my actual question: What is the fraud-vector here?
> So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
The industry has some extensive experience in independently verifying signatures, I don't see how the manufacturers factor in here. And for app features, just ask banks how integrating biometrics, payment services, etc. goes. Tends to be preferred, once Apple and Google Pay became fully available here in Austria, banks dropped their own NFC payment solutions in rapid succession.
>So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
There would be no contract, you just upload image from your phone and they verify signature in the file
Some banks needs photos of machine readable IDs to verify user details to fight fraud. These IDs can be passports or NFC enabled EU (and compatible) ID cards.
This will allow banks to trust these cameras more on the long run, allowing higher security ID checks.
Okay, this doesn't answer the question on the vector but is another interesting example. Let's expand on that one then:
Banks are offloading the trusted process of ID verification to an untrusted entity (end-user, merchant,...) and compensate for the loss of security by using a trusted service-provider (now Apple AND an iPhone 18 Pro).
This is already happening today in two scenarios:
1. lower-risk scenarios (remotely) with trusted 3rd party service-providers and very low Hardware-requirements ("use this app on your phone to take a picture/video") and
2. higher-risk scenarios (on-site) with trusted 3rd party service-providers ("use THIS expensive device to take a picture/video of the customer/citizen")
Apple now potentially disrupts the service-provider industry of #2 (higher-risk scenarios) by
#a grabbing a part of this hardware/service market that MAY allow the end-user to be in control of the device and
#b replacing the on-site hardware/service with an iPhone "in a box".
They can't disrupt #1 because their cost-saving can't mandate the end-user to buy a 1000+ USD device just for THEM to provide the contracted service. (They can add convenience if you have it, but they can't reject their service if you don't)
Which means they disrupt mainly #2: The industry providing trusted imaging solutions for higher-risk scenarios.
--> So it's the Watch Ultra game all over again.
On Watch Ultra they disrupted the diving-watch market by the sheer scale of selling their development to everyone buying a Watch Ultra, driving down the cost so much that they can undercut every diving-watch company on the market.
Now they use the sheer scale of iPhone 18 Pro sales to enter the trusted-imaging market-segment, undercutting every player there and take that market.
Don't forget law enforcement, customs or any high(ish) stakes sector which needs to be able to trust the images they show as evidence as well.
Back in the day Canon and Nikon tried this with embedded private keys on their cameras, and with Sandisk's WORM SD cards. Then, somebody extracted the keys and it was game over.
While my iPhone 17 can't match a full frame mirrorless camera, it can take pretty impressive photos, so they are already more than adequate in detail and clarity department. So making these images trusted is a huge win for them.
ID document verification via NFC can't by itself replace also biometrically verifying the person purporting to be the one that the document belongs to.
Without it, anyone with a stolen document can pass it. (I don't think there's a generally available database of stolen documents, so I suspect these usually remain valid until their regular date of epxiry.)
Generally, the information in our country is checked via multiple ways:
NFC + Biometric data (checked against the data inside the ID card) (+ photo of the ID in some cases), or any combination of those.
Before deepfakes were dime a dozen, I remember my bank starting a video-call with me and required me to show my ID to them via camera. This was after a multi-factor check that I passed.
Making any of these factors more trustworthy is a win in my perspective, so having a trusted sensor is always better even if you do multi-factor authentication.
Our ID cards have a private-public key pair inside them, and it allows us to sign things amongst other things. Renewing your ID card for any reason revokes the digital signature of the previous one, so scanning it via NFC probably enough to check whether it's revoked. Same with photo (since machine readable part contains serial and check digits and such).
Nowadays they do #3, demand that the customer takes pictures with a special app that claims to make the process nearly as trusted as #1 while being nearly as cheap as #2.
The idea is indeed that instead or in addition to requiring an app, the insurance company would require the app to run on a phone that supports Reference Image to make sure the image wasn't tampered with. Not right now, when the phones are new, but in a while when 50% of Americans have a sufficiently new iPhone. The rest of the people gets told to either borrow one if they want to make a claim, or go through some other alternative process designed to be so annoying that most people give up.
According to the description in the article, "an outside observer cannot determine whether any pair of reference images were taken by the same device." and they "avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor"
I never asked them to waste additional resources by injecting my blunt keyword-query into an AI-cluster and guesstimate a well-formed article from that.
But here I am, with (elder) relatives sending me Google search-results on topics like they are proper articles...
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