Disclosure, labelling and marking are three things
Disclosure is an act aimed at a person. Labelling is one way of performing it. Marking is a technical operation on a file that may or may not reach anybody. The three are routinely used as synonyms. As of 2026-09-12.
| Word | Who it is aimed at |
|---|---|
| Disclosure | An audience; it has to reach them |
| Labelling | An audience, through a specific visible form |
| Marking | Software, or nobody in particular |
| Provenance | Whoever inspects the file later |
Inclusion rule. Terms used interchangeably in commentary about synthetic-media transparency. Order. From the act aimed at people to the operation aimed at software.
1A disclosure that nobody receives is not one
The test is whether a person is told. Metadata in a container does not tell anybody anything unless a platform chooses to surface it, and nothing obliges a platform to.
So a file can be thoroughly marked and disclose nothing. That is not a paradox; it is two different mechanisms aimed at two different readers, and only one of them is a person.
2A label is a form, and forms have properties
Position, size, wording, duration and language all decide whether a label functions. A claim that a label exists without any of those is a claim about a file rather than about a viewer's experience.
Almost no product page states any of them. It is the least documented part of the whole subject, and it is the part a disclosure obligation actually turns on.
3Marking is where the engineering is, and the least of the problem
Most published discussion is about mechanisms: manifests, signals, detectors. That is where the interesting work is and it is not where most obligations fall for most people publishing.
A production can satisfy a disclosure duty with a sentence in a description. It cannot satisfy a marking duty at all, because that one was never addressed to it.
4Why the conflation persists
Vendors describe marking because marking is what they can build. Regulators describe disclosure because disclosure is what audiences need. Commentary averages the two and produces a word that means neither.
A register can only help by naming which it means each time. That is a small discipline with a large effect on whether any sentence in it can be relied on.
5Published material behind this entry
A term in this record: what it means, and what the published material says about it, each figure read on 2026-09-12. Related: Interoperable, Robust.