Facebook May Soon Assign Your Camera a Unique Fingerprint For Identification

A new patent filed by Facebook suggests that the social networking giant is working on giving user cameras a unique digital fingerprint. Looking for ways to identify fraudulent accounts and evermore establish what connections you may have with others, the new technology means that your future photographs will be tracked at levels previously unimaginable. For photographers, however, it may be an excellent way to prove that you truly own an image.

Reading into the Facebook patent, we can discover that the company plans on using unique characteristics that a camera may possess such as lens scratches, bad pixels, color bleeding, and other image artifacts. Combining this information with typical EXIF data and facial recognition could prove to be a powerful discovery tool.

Aside from noting that the system could be used for detecting fraudulent accounts, Facebook does not go into detail about its latest idea. If the technology were ever to become available, however, it could be a great way for photographers to prove that an image was taken with their equipment.

Until Facebook decides exactly what they want to do with the technology, we will simply have to wait and wonder.

(via Google Patents via Geek)