Our idea is similar to the Filecoin but there are some important differences:
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The storage infrastructure should be homogeneous. It should not comprise independent storage providers all negotiating different deals with storage requestors. Instead, a storage node should be an entity providing some backbone storage for a fixed fee. Whether the nodes should be owned by a single “operator” or by independent providers remains to be clarified. But they should all play by the same rules which should lead to a simpler protocol.
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From the security standpoint, the threat model should be primarily focused on data integrity. It should be prevented that some data stored in the network is manipulated or deleted. In Filecoin, AFAIK, the storage contract can be broken by the provider at the expense of forfeiting its fee. For our use case, data stored in the network should be immutable. It should be kept for a prescribed time interval and it can only be removed upon a legitimate request of its creator / owner.
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Another issue is timestamping. The time at which the data is stored should be recorded and verified in the network, in contrast to trusted time service used in conventional applications. Ideally, other metadata, e.g., GPS location, should be verified but I do not see at the moment how this can be achieved. Perhaps some ideas could be borrowed from logistics use cases whose goal is to verifiably determine the location of goods at arbitrary time points. In this way, the location of a client taking pictures should be verifiable at any time.