> It's very likely your printer is secretly adding marks to the page

It's most likely how the FBI caught NSA leaker Reality Winner:

> Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the documents, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

and then in few years a new mono-mustachioed or mono-browed leader will emerge who declares memes a blasphemy punishable by death and will call up all the telemetry gathered to punish all involved.

While it does make a difference, their willingness to quietly integrate watermarking features into what people saw as simple apps for doing simple tasks is unnerving. It only takes a small change for them to start baking your identifiable information into all images they edit, or some government politely asking them to do that.

I wonder if in ten years we'll have a horrifying world where everything that leaves a machine is imprinted with its permanent identifier. Every file comes with a verifiable history of who created it, what computers it passed through, who made edits. We're closer to that world than we think.

It does kind of say: The GUID is coming from the moderation endpoint, which is hit when you generate a local or cloud AI image based on your prompt. If there is no prompt, there is no endpoint, and likely no GUID.

Obviously Paint could have been watermarking prior to AI though, but this specific AI watermarking appears to be only that.

Windows 11 effectively forces users to register with a Microsoft account. Once that's established, all it takes is for an unaware user to fill out an e-commerce form and save an address for auto-fill.

> Make sure you register mailing addresses with your credit card institutions

Sorry for a dumb question but what would one use as a mailing address? Rent a PO box, or use a mail forwarding service, something like that?

This is broadly impractical for the average citizen. A scalable solution would be to make this sort of thing illegal.

> IANAL but they are not a government or financial institution and do not have a right to that information.

As soon as you purchase something from Microsoft - e.g. your Office 365 subscription - they have at the very least your billing address on file for the credit card.

a GUID isn't an indicator, it's a fingerprint.

so unless you want to draw a distinction between 'user' and 'machine' , yeah it is for identifying users.

to believe otherwise, especially with Microsoft involved, would be incredibly naive to their history.

Article literally says it adds a guid, not a binary field indicating that the image is ai generated.

add your IP, location, provider, computer specs, dimensions, screen info, nearby devices, etc etc etc

Ain't nobody anon anymore thanks to the image recording GPS radio in the pocket.

Why would the EU possibly object to this? It is exactly what they want.

> This really needs to be hit with the GDPR hammer. Microsoft have not obtained consent for this.

At best they'd just disable it for EU... assuming they didn't successfully argue "it was in the ToS ..."

Watermarking ai generated stuff is mandated by EU

I am a human and I upvoted the comment immediately. Do not underestimate the wide ranging hate for age verification. Even my normie friends are against it. Meta/etc have been buying those laws but at the cost of more and more people waking up to privacy activism. I predict in a couple years it'll backlash as people first fight against AV, and then fight for more broad privacy reform in the US. At least for myself, I had never been actively calling my reps until the AV laws.

> I think there is a good argument for being able to distinguish AI generated image and video...

Neat but that's not what's being built here. What's being built is "we can trace back this content to who made it" which is bad. Doesn't matter if today that it's limited to AI generated content. Won't be tomorrow. Your devices should not act against your best interests. No cop in my pocket please.