Photofy

Photofy is a revolutionary platform designed to combat digital misinformation by verifying the trustworthiness of online images. Through a sophisticated on-chain database of interconnected images stored on Filecoin, Photofy provides an in-depth look at each image's edit history and the degree of modification from its original state. Root images are added upon creation, with subsequent modifications meticulously logged on-chain, offering viewers the ability to ascertain the changes made and the author behind them.

The platform goes beyond just tracking changes; it generates a real-time trust score for each image, calculated based on the sum of all modifications made from root to leaf. The trust score hinges on the credibility of the individual making the changes and the significance of those changes. Trust scores for individuals are determined using Worldcoin identities, assigned by a trusted group of moderators, providing an added layer of assurance. Photofy is presently equipped with an application extension and a dedicated photo editing application for demonstration purposes. Future implementations envisage integration into popular photo editing software like Photoshop and GIMP. Additionally, a Google Chrome extension enables the embedding of Photofy's data into webpages, offering users a seamless experience to understand the history and trustworthiness of images across the web.

At its core, Photofy is an on-chain database of interconnected images. Each image is a node within the graph, and images are connected to each other based on the edit history, and the entire graph is stored on Filecoin. Root images are added upon creation, either when it is imported into the system by a trusted user, captured by a camera, or created by a generative model that implements our software. Photo editing software that implements our plugin will keep track of the changes made to each image, storing the magnitude and author of each change on-chain.

When viewing an image, you can query the image database, find out the changes that have been made, and generate a trust score for each image in real-time based on the sum of all changes made to an image from root to leaf.

The trustworthiness score takes into account who made the change and how significant that change is. For example, a journalist at a reputable media organization making a change to an image’s colour would not be alarming. However, should a nonreputable party make drastic changes to the contents of an image, a user ought to be informed. Currently, the effect of each modification has been somewhat arbitrarily selected, however, in the future governance or other democratic processes could be used to refine these figures. 

Currently, Worldcoin identities are used to track individual people, and these individuals have trust scores based on decisions made by a trusted group of moderators. This way if an individual is known to be malicious, they can be marked as such and users can be informed. Our current implementation combines both a homemade privative photo editing application and Photofy's application extension into a single package for demonstration purposes. In the future, we would integrate into apps like Photoshop, GIMP, and other editing software to better track the history of an image from capture to completion.