"I'm curious where the boundary is on that, then – if it works if you had some easy method to brute force it, like using a Caeser cipher? Except, you know, something simple like that that worked on an image."

"I dunno. But I mean, it makes sense—theoretically there's a decryption key that could turn a picture of a backpack into a picture of you."

"Yeah, there could be some complicated method of 'set the first byte to this if not already this, else a random number' to reproduce it." He shrugs.

"Right, but what I mean is that the fact that this electronic picture is a picture of you is an implementation detail of the software, and relies exclusively on our translation methods, and technically any piece of information can be turned into any other piece so the magic has to have a way of figuring out whether one does or does not count as data about you."

"Yeah," he nods. "Because otherwise if it didn't care about that sort of thing then I could have something that spews out random bytes and hope I get an 'infinite monkeys and Shakespeare' moment where I get an image of someone, and the chance of me being able to do that could count as 'ownership'. But it doesn't, presumably, and nor does the 'it could be any method of encryption' thing count as ownership."

"Yeah. Anyway, uh, I don't think we got any info from this?"

"Not that we could have guessed before, not really, but it's at least made sure that it doesn't privilege that specific format, decrypted on some specific hard drive format or whatever. Sway seems not too different from normal, too, so the encryption doesn't seem to have changed much if any, except how the rules of ownership function."

"Anyway, our hypotheses were ease of making copies, ability to edit," she consults her notes, "computers outputting more light—seems unlikely—being able to put it on a big screen to show more people, maybe just ease of sharing, and I'm not sure what you meant here by data transfer rates, and we didn't really manage to distinguish between them."

"I meant it might be based on how quickly you can make copies or move the data elsewhere? Since with computers that's pretty fast, with physical copies not so much? But that's pretty much the same as the first one, 'ease of making copies'."

"Ah. Well, some evidence in this direction would be a different storage method?"

"… Like a CD?" he asks, holding one up.

"I'm not sure if a CD is distinct enough from a USB key in that respect but um sure I guess?"

"Do you mean, like, a floppy disk instead then? Or are you talking about non-electronic storage media?"

"Non-electronic, yeah. Like, if you could lower an electronic picture's resolution to the point it's the same as an analog camera's and then compare to what's stored inside the camera."

"See how well film works versus digital?" he asks. "Yeah, that's seems like a good extension of the test we did with the paper copy, gather more data?"

"Yeah. It should work less well if ease of copying is the relevant thing."

"I'm not sure what sort of 'resolution' film cameras have? Could try researching it and hope we can set the phone camera to that? – Oh, and I'm kinda curious to see how photoshopping the image would affect sway."

"You could just look it up then upload the electronic picture and change its resolution manually."

"Yeah," he agrees. "That should work but maybe we should test it anyway? Try taking two photos at a different resolution on a phone, manually alter the higher-res to be the lower res, check sway from them is the same?"

"I'm not sure the phone can do different res, though."

"Mine at least can do a bunch of different ones? 12.8 megapixels, 9.6 megapixels, 1080p, 720p and a few others?" He holds up the menu.

She looks for a similar menu in hers. "Huh, mine can do that too." She takes a 12.8 megapixels picture, then a 720p one, which doesn't add any more noticeable sway on top of the first one.

"Why are you okay with using Dropbox for these tests but not okay with emailing pictures?"

"I'm– not really but we were using it for that test and I couldn't think of an equivalent alternative? Plus it was only really a small complaint, and it seems like the 'ownership' works like the word suggests, instead of being, like, 'everyone who can access it'?"

"Yeah."