Real footage is getting buried. Your documentation still matters.

In January 2026, AI-generated ICE raid videos spread across Facebook and TikTok and got more engagement than the real footage. The White House posted a doctored photo of a civil rights activist's arrest and called it a meme. Real documentation is being drowned out - and when it surfaces, anyone can claim it is fake.

Witness is a free camera app that cryptographically proves your photos and videos are real and unedited, at the moment you capture them.

Prove your footage is real. At the moment of capture.

When you take a photo with Witness, five independent verification layers activate automatically. If anyone changes a single pixel, all proofs break. Anyone can verify your footage through a web page - no app needed, no trust in us required. The proofs use open standards and survive even if Witness disappears.

Cryptographic fingerprint Any change to the image breaks the proof (SHA-256)
Hardware attestation Proves the photo came from a real phone running the real app (Apple App Attest)
Tamper-proof signature Signed by your phone's hardware security chip (Secure Enclave)
Industry-standard credentials The same standard used by Adobe, Microsoft, and BBC (C2PA)
Permanent timestamp Decentralized proof of when the photo existed (OpenTimestamps / Bitcoin)

No cryptocurrency, no tokens, no speculation. Bitcoin is used only as a timestamp anchor.

What Witness collects: nothing.

Stays on your phone

All photos and videos you capture
GPS coordinates and metadata
No user account, no profile, no personal information collected
No analytics, no behavior tracking, no usage data

The only data that leaves your phone

To Apple: device attestation request (proves your phone is genuine - no photo data sent)
To OpenTimestamps: your photo's hash only (a string of numbers - not the photo, not your location)
When you choose to share: whatever you explicitly decide to share, with whoever you decide to share it with

"Allow While Using" location permission - no background tracking. Revocable at any time.

No account required to use the app. No login. No signup.

Built on open standards. If Witness disappeared tomorrow, your verified photos would still be verifiable using free, public tools.

Works offline

Capture without cell service. Verification syncs when you are back online. Works when cell towers are overloaded, jammed, or out of range.

Free. No account required.

Download, open, capture. No email, no phone number, no signup. No paywall.

Anyone can verify

Send your photo to anyone. They can check all five proof layers through a web page. No app download needed. No trust in Witness needed.

Built for teams

Create an organization in Witness and invite your members to join. When your team documents an event, all that footage flows into an organization-level feed - organized, timestamped, geolocated, and provably real. No more hunting through camera rolls or group chats. Everyone contributes to the same verified feed, and the whole team's documentation is in one place.

Invite members

Invite people you know to your organization. Everyone's verified captures feed into a shared, organized timeline.

Organization feed

All your team's verified photos and videos in one place. Timestamped, geolocated, and searchable.

Share as a team

Text it, post to Twitter, or share your org's verified feed directly. The verification travels with every piece of content.

The Live Map

When your team documents an event, the map shows what happened - organized by time, location, and organization. Every piece of content is cryptographically verified. Sharing to the map is always opt-in.

Time Location Organization

12:00 PM 3:18 PM 6:00 PM

Filter by Time

Scroll through a timeline to see what happened hour by hour

Filter by Location

Zoom into any area and see all verified content from that spot

Filter by Organization

See content from specific groups or campaigns

Built by someone who has been in the room.

Nico Goldberg worked with immigrants in ICE detention, then spent two years as a client advocate at the Alameda County Public Defender's Office. He saw firsthand what happens when documentation gets challenged or dismissed. After finishing his JD/MBA at Penn, he started researching the space and confirmed with forensic experts: no tool authenticates photos at the moment of capture.

Marshall Vyletel Jr (Applied Mathematics & Computer Science, Brown University) designed Witness's entire five-layer cryptographic verification architecture from scratch. He previously built decentralized authentication protocols and tokenized verification systems. Marshall is the technical architect behind how all five proof layers work together - from Secure Enclave signing to C2PA integration.

They built Witness together because the experts in forensic imagery confirmed: every existing solution tries to detect fakes after the fact, and that approach is losing.

Questions

No. Photos stay on your phone. We do not have servers storing your footage. We do not track your location in the background. We do not create user accounts. We do not know who you are.

We cannot hand over what we do not have. Your photos are stored on your device, not on our servers. The only external data transmission is a cryptographic hash (a string of numbers) to OpenTimestamps and an attestation request to Apple. Neither contains your photos or metadata.

The live map is opt-in only. Nothing appears on any map unless you explicitly choose to share it. By default, your photos are private and local to your device.

iOS only right now. Android is planned for 2026. We know this is a real limitation - a lot of the communities that need this most use Android. If your organization wants to be notified when the Android version launches, email us at team@witnesshq.com.

Yes. Free to download, free to use, no premium tier, no in-app purchases.

No cryptocurrency, no tokens, no speculation. We use Bitcoin only as a timestamp anchor - your photo's hash gets embedded in a transaction to prove when it existed. The photo itself never touches the blockchain.

Try it.

Download for iOS

Questions? Email Nico directly at team@witnesshq.com

If your organization documents ICE enforcement, police encounters, or direct actions and wants to test Witness, reach out. No pitch - we just want to hear what you actually need.