CAI spotlight: ‘78 Days,’ a verified photo archive from Starling and Reuters

You’ve likely seen this scenario play out online: Photojournalists who work diligently to build a reputation for trustworthy and accurate reporting find their images taken out of context, or even edited by others. So how can newsrooms, editors, photojournalists, and publishers address this? Project Starling, jointly developed by the USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering, presents an approach using cryptographic methods and decentralized protocols to securely capture, store, and verify accuracy of images. They partnered with Reuters and blockchain data integrity startup Numbers to apply CAI attribution standards to the resulting photojournalism project 78 Days. Today, Starling is launching their work as a prototype archive that exemplifies tamper-evident transparency around the capture and editing process of photojournalism.  

How they did it  

Starling co-founder Jonathan Dotan is an early collaborator and champion of CAI, notably as a co-author of the foundational white paper we published last August. Through early access to CAI specifications and tooling, Dotan and the Starling team implemented our technology so that 78 consecutive days of photographs produced by Reuters photojournalists were created with cryptographically secure metadata. Their goal was to use and evaluate tools for secure capture, storage, and verification of images. See the results and more about the image authentication technology used in the Starling prototype archive using CAI attribution standards here. 

How you can see it  

The 78 Days project uses prototype software developed by the CAI team at Adobe to display relevant data accompanying an image. Visitors to the 78 Days project website will see a clickable information icon in the upper right corner of images on the site. If you scroll to the bottom of the preview box and click the View More button, you’ll have access to Verify, a new CAI tool that anyone can use to inspect images and compare previous versions or other pictures used in their creation.  

Why it matters  

Applying CAI technology to images provides consumers with the information they need to make better, more informed decisions about what to trust online. 78 Days definitively demonstrates how news organizations can apply secure provenance to combat misinformation in newsrooms and beyond. We look forward to continuing to work with pioneering organizations across hardware, software, publishing, and social media to push forward the core CAI tenet of restoring trust in media through transparency.