The future of image security
SASHA (Safe Share) is a Danish tech startup founded in 2020, dedicated to ensuring online privacy and combating image abuse. SASHA's mission is to assist individuals and companies victimized by image misuse by embedding evidence within their images. Unlike B2B-only products that focus solely on image protection, SASHA addresses the core issue: the legitimate fear that personal images are shared without their consent.
With the new Digital Services Act, the EU aims to regain control over stolen digital content by putting pressure on tech companies to reduce image abuse. This makes SASHA's timing perfect. According to BetterStudio (2023), 2.5 billion images are misused online daily across countless devices, sites, and platforms. There are over 45 million reported victims of image abuse (Powell & Scott, 2023), and more than 3,000 revenge porn sites worldwide (Jenkins et al., 2019). Image abuse is a significant societal issue, impacting both individuals and businesses. Unauthorized and fraudulent use of copyrighted content, including images, is predicted to result in a $1.8 trillion loss by 2028 (Global Brand Counterfeiting Report 2020). SASHA's primary goal is to protect images through prevention and enable prosecution. Their technology not only protects images, but can also identify the leaker of a specific image by embedding hidden watermarks and evidence within images, creating a passive fingerprint in each copy. This allows users to trace and identify the leaker of an image when it is shared or manipulated online.
Developing this technology required meeting several significant criteria. Due to privacy concerns, SASHA had to protect images without viewing them. Besides that, the solution also needed to be cross-platform compatible and capable of continuous tracking and detection. Additionally, it had to work with heavily compressed images and lastly, it needed to generate proof of ownership and identify the leaker in the leaked material.
Current Status
Currently, SASHA provides 100% protection against unmanipulated and compressed images and 80% protection against medium-to-heavily manipulated images. This latter percentage is improving, as their system incorporates a tool that feeds hacked images into their AI models, training them to counteract such attacks.
SASHA is currently developing a tool integrated with their image protection engine, called the Context Engine. This tool aims to provide real-time contextual protection against the misuse of people’s content in news stories. For instance, when a post takes a picture from an article out of context, the Context Engine can identify the image’s owner, look up the article, contextualize the content, and provide instant feedback on inaccuracies. This capability is an important step forward when it comes to combating fake news, as it can offer real-time responses, addressing the challenge that community feedback faces in keeping up with the rapid generation of fake news.
An AI tool like SASHA can be highly valuable to media companies for verifying content authenticity and safeguarding their reputation. In a time when misinformation spreads easily, such a tool helps verify the authenticity of photos and videos, allowing media outlets to confidently publish accurate visuals. Besides that, it also maintains the company’s credibility by avoiding the risk of accidentally distributing fake images. By consistently verifying images, media companies can demonstrate due diligence, which also offers legal protection. Additionally, tools like SASHA can identify unauthorized alterations of proprietary images, helping protect intellectual property while preventing the manipulation of legitimate content for malicious purposes.
By providing this contextual information, SASHA believes that their Context Engine is a groundbreaking technology that can enforce both image protection and contextual integrity, addressing a significant area of misuse. The startup is still looking for potential partners, so don’t hesitate to contact them if this sounds like an interesting opportunity at https://www.sasha.eu/.
Sasha was introduced to the Sandbox Hub by Media City Odense.
