A Journalist’s Best Friend? New App To Verify Authenticity Of Photos, Videos And Audio In Development

An organization that encourages citizens to document human rights abuses around the world is developing an app which will not only make it easier for them to do so, but may also save a lot of journalists a lot of headache. Witness, the group that describes part of their mission as using “video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations,” is set to release “InformaCam,” the app which will allow users to verify the authenticity of video, photos or audio created from mobile devices.

Witness is joining with The Guardian Project to build the app. The groups are receiving $320,000 in funding from Knight Foundation. Sam Gregory, program director for Witness, said, “InformaCam is our way to respond to this question of media authentication and model some solutions we hope people will adopt.”

Gregory spoke to Justin Ellis at Nieman Lab about how the app would work. InformaCam would create something like a technological watermark for video or photo content and pairs that with metadata like time and location.

“The first part of the Knight grant will help us work out how InformaCam addresses the challenges of how do you gather as much contextualizing data about a photo or video,” he said.

The second challenge, according to Ellis, is how to create a system to show whether a video has been tampered with after being shot. Gregory noted that the software will not be a perfect solution to the problem of media authenticity, but will certainly help.

“It won’t prove everything is true,” he said. “But, given the volume of media, you can make it easier for people to distinguish what is verifiable and help step up that ladder.”

Besides human rights and journalism uses, Gregory also said the app will be useful for things like documenting insurance claims and shooting natural disasters.

An alpha version of InformaCam is currently available for Android phones and Gregory said the pilot would launch in three to six months.

Interestingly, Witness also worked with The Guardian Project on something nearly the opposite of InformaCam: it was called ObscuraCam and allowed users to conceal identifies of photo subjects by pixelating faces and removing metadata.

h/t Nieman Lab