Inspiration

Trust in civic information feels fragile. A single fake voice call in a primary showed how easy it is to mislead voters. Detection tools help but break under pressure. Provenance gives a clearer signal of origin and edits. That insight shaped the PICC Compact.

What it does

PICC Compact is a policy plan that makes Content Credentials the default in four high-stakes areas. • Government and public-sector communication • Civic advertising and official campaign media • Wire and photojournalism • Public safety and health alerts It uses procurement clauses and platform eligibility rules to create provenance-first zones without broad speech rules.

How we built it

We wrote a single APA-style policy report. We grounded it in NIST guidance, the EU AI Act, the G7 Hiroshima Process, and the C2PA 2.2 standard. We added a minimal technical profile, a clear rollout plan, and ready-to-use clause text and platform policy text. Figures show scope, pipeline, and timeline.

Challenges we ran into

• Keeping credentials intact through edits and distribution
• Aligning policies across regions and platforms
• Protecting creator privacy while preserving useful provenance
• Explaining provenance to the public with simple, honest UI cues

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

• Narrow scope that targets the highest-impact channels
• Practical levers that move markets through procurement and ads
• Templates that agencies and platforms can adopt with low friction
• A measurement plan that makes progress visible and verifiable

What we learned

Procurement changes vendor behavior. Ad rules change campaign behavior. Wire defaults spread quickly through newsrooms. Small visible badges and plain manifests help people trust what they see.

What’s next for PICC Compact: Public-Interest Content Credentials

• Publish the Compact and the procurement clause
• Secure one launch partner in government, one platform, one wire service
• Switch on civic-ad eligibility that requires valid credentials
• Ship a first transparency report with coverage and response-time metrics

Built With

• biblatex
• c2pa
• eu
• nist
• tex
• tikz