Editing Provenance (section)

==Computers and law==
The term ''provenance'' is used when ascertaining the source of goods such as computer hardware to assess if they are genuine or counterfeit. [[Chain of custody]] is an equivalent term used in law, especially for evidence in criminal or commercial cases.

Software provenance encompasses the origin of software and its [[Software license|licensing terms]]. For example, when incorporating a free, open source or proprietary software component in an application, one may wish to understand its provenance to ensure that licensing requirements are fulfilled and that other software characteristics can be understood.

Data provenance covers the provenance of computerized data. There are two main aspects of data provenance: ownership of the data and data usage. Ownership will tell the user who is responsible for the source of the data, ideally including information on the originator of the data. Data usage gives details regarding how the data has been used and modified and often includes information on how to cite the data source or sources.<ref name="Ma, et al." />

Data provenance is of particular concern with electronic data, as data sets are often modified and copied without proper citation or acknowledgement of the originating data set. Databases make it easy to select specific information from data sets and merge this data with other data sources without any documentation of how the data was obtained or how it was modified from the original data set or sets.<ref name="Ma, et al." />
The automated analysis of data provenance graphs has been described as a mean to verify compliance with regulations regarding data usage such as introduced by the EU [[General Data Protection Regulation|GDPR]].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pasquier |first1=Thomas |last2=Singh |first2=Jatinder |last3=Powles |first3=Julia |last4=Eyers |first4=David |last5=Seltzer |first5=Margo |last6=Bacon |first6=Jean |title=Data provenance to audit compliance with privacy policy in the Internet of Things |journal=Personal and Ubiquitous Computing |date=1 April 2018 |volume=22 |issue=2 |pages=333–344 |doi=10.1007/s00779-017-1067-4 |s2cid=4594884 |url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3210921 |issn=1617-4909|hdl=1983/1e7615ae-28fa-497e-9ba7-2522df980a56 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>

Secure Provenance refers to providing integrity and confidentiality guarantees to provenance information. In other words, secure provenance means to ensure that history cannot be rewritten, and users can specify who else can look into their actions on the object.<ref name="fast09">[http://www.usenix.org/events/fast09/tech/full_papers/hasan/hasan_html/index.html The Case of the Fake Picasso: Preventing History Forgery with Secure Provenance], Hasan et al., USENIX FAST 2009.</ref><ref>{{cite conference | title=Chaining for securing data provenance in distributed information networks | author=Xinlei (Oscar) Wang, Kai Zeng, Kannan Govindan and Prasant Mohapatra. | book-title=In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference for Military Communications. | year=2012 | pages=1–6 | conference=MILCOM '12 | doi=10.1109/MILCOM.2012.6415609| isbn=978-1-4673-1731-3 }}</ref>

A simple method of ensuring data provenance in computing is to mark a file as [[File system permissions#Permissions|read only]]. This allows the user to view the contents of the file, but not edit or otherwise modify it. Read only can also in some cases prevent the user from accidentally or intentionally [[File deletion#Problem with accidental removal|deleting the file]].