3 ms·
You can take additional measures, but you can never be sure that you've avoided all forms of watermarking. As an extreme example, suppose a company distributed
by redfern314 6y ago
You can take additional measures, but you can never be sure that you've avoided all forms of watermarking. As an extreme example, suppose a company distributed 4 versions of a document to employees, each printed in red, blue, green, or black ink (a variant of steganography). Even though you've taken a crap photo, you still have the color in evidence, and they know which subset of the employee pool the leak came from.
Any number of techniques like this could be used, such that you can't be sure the "watermark" is gone without making the document functionally useless - especially if you don't know what the watermark is. e.g. maybe you take a black and white photo of the document above, but they also changed some of the wording on the page in each version.
+1 to my sibling comment's point about how each digital device you use to cover your trail will do its best to leave a new trail.
- JorgeGT 6y agoAnother technique is variation of language (synonyms), orthotypography, variations in the white space of the document... so you can take a blurry B&W picture but they still got you because your version was the one saying "amazing" and not "fantastic" in the third paragraph and using the Oxford comma in the fourth paragraph, etc.
- redfern314 6y agoExactly. Thinking about this starts to border on paranoia, but if the document is written by a sufficiently determined organization, it's all possible.
- Izkata 6y agoOne I vaguely remember reading about years ago (not as an example, as an actual instance) included where the word wrap occurred, so on some copies a word ended a line and on others the word started the next line.