Documentation
What happens when I protect something?
A one-way matching record is created and signed by your Ma’atara identity. The record becomes public; your source work does not.
When you protect something, your device reads the file and computes a set of measurements from it: a cryptographic hash of the exact bytes, perceptual hashes that survive cropping and re-encoding, a tiled fingerprint, and — for images and video — a semantic descriptor that recognises the same subject even after heavy editing.
Those measurements are gathered into a capsule, signed with your key, and registered. The source file stays on your device; the capsule, fingerprints, signature and record metadata are uploaded.
It only goes one way
A capsule does not contain the source work. Reconstructing a source from its digest alone is computationally impractical, but fingerprints are not anonymous: they can be compared with candidate material and may reveal that known content matches.
What a capsule can do is settle a question: does this file I am looking at match something that was registered, and when was it registered, and by whom.
What becomes public
The matching record and its signature. Roughly four kilobytes. Anyone can fetch it, and anyone can check the signature against your public key without your involvement and without an account.