Most personal safety apps are alarms. They make noise, or they send your location to someone. GOTCHA Safety Camera does something narrower and, on the morning after, more useful: it takes a photo and makes that photo hard to argue with.
What happens when you press the shutter
One tap. In the time it takes to put the phone back in your pocket, the app has done five things:
- captured the photo,
- recorded where you were and the exact time,
- taken a SHA-256 fingerprint of the image as it came off the sensor,
- encrypted the whole thing with AES-256-GCM, and
- queued it for your vault.
All of it is fixed at the moment the shutter fires. None of it is typed in afterwards, which is the entire point — a timestamp you can edit later is not a timestamp.
It works with no signal
Capturing, fingerprinting and sealing all happen on the phone. No connection is needed and none is waited for. A basement car park, a lift, a road with no coverage — the capture is complete and sealed before the app has any opinion about the network. When you are back online, it uploads itself.
If you don't give it location access
The photo is still captured and still sealed. It is recorded as having no coordinates rather than being given false ones, because a capture that quietly invents a location is worse than one that admits it does not know. The only permission the app actually requires is the camera.
Photos only
There is no video recording and no audio recording — not in the app, and not on the GOTCHA-CAM hardware. This is a deliberate limit. Recording audio turns a safety tool into a legal problem in a lot of places, and video makes the evidence chain far harder to keep honest.
Nothing lands in your camera roll
Captures are never written to the phone's gallery. They live encrypted in the app. A private capture's key is held in the device's own keystore and never reaches us, so we cannot open it even if we wanted to or were compelled to. Captures you share with your circle are encrypted with the circle's key, which our server gives only to its current members.
The people you trust
A Guardian Circle is up to five people — you and four others. They are alerted the moment you capture. One subscription covers the whole circle; members join with a code and need no subscription of their own.
GOTCHA-CAM
A separate camera you can leave in place, paired to your phone by scanning its QR sticker, talking over Bluetooth only. It is still in development — the app is out now and does not need it.
How a capture is sealed, in detail →