Whenever The Verge interviews people from companies that have something to do with photography or image processing, they ask “what is a photograph?”. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus.
As a photographer, I’ve thought a fair amount about it. Many of the most famous pre-digital photographers did a lot of adjustment in the darkroom, and all digital photographs involve decisions about how photoreceptor data gets transformed into a viewable image, even if the photographer didn’t make them intentionally. Most of the time, most people still consider it photography and “real” with significant editing.
Where it becomes something else in my mind, or “fake” is if the image doesn’t reasonably represent light that reached the lens in the moment being depicted. There’s a whole lot of wiggle room there of course - photography is art, not math. Adding fire to something that wasn’t burning using editing software, however clearly crosses the line into “fake” for me if presented as a photograph, or digital art if it’s not.










Someone logging timestamps for messages received on both ends of a conversation would be able to determine that two people are probably talking to each other given enough data. Signal is probably not doing that, but Signal’s other security guarantees provided by an open source client that encrypts communications end to end hold even if the organization was infiltrated or taken over by a bad actor. The anonymity of participants in a conversation is not protected as strongly as the contents of messages.