Let’s TAC™ About It: Digital Watermarking

For the fourth installment of our blog series, we will cover TAC™’s digital watermarking functionality. So, are you ready to TAC™ about it?

For centuries, watermarks have been used to verify currencies and important documents and to discourage counterfeiting. Today, watermarks are used for the same purpose to protect music, photos, videos, software, and other digital data.

The main goal of our TAC™ platform is to keep data private by not transferring data. Having said that, there are times when it is necessary (e.g., for audit or regulatory purposes) to transfer some data between trusted parties. 

At VIA, we use watermarking to enable data auditability when data owners choose to transfer data. For example, two organizations can receive identical datasets. If it is later found that data has been leaked, the data owner can review the leaked data and trace it back to the original analyst that requested it.

TAC™ automates the process of maintaining the provenance of data. As long as the data was transferred using TAC™, no additional steps are required by the data owner and there is no noticeable difference to analysts.

Watermarking is a simple and automatic method to provide auditability to data.