Alibi: The Recording App That Acts as a Witness

A team of software developers have created a mobile app that automatically records your life for you – audio, video, pictures, and geolocation – just in case you might need a witness. The aptly named Alibi passively records you, all day long, deleting recordings after an hour. Should something happen that you require permanent documentation of, you can save the recorded data to support you should you need it.

Inspiration for the app came from an incident involving Ryan Seleh, one of Alibi’s coders, in which he was accosted by two police officers. Saleh’s car was pulled over in New York, and one of the officers began searching the vehicle. After a chat with his uncle, Saleh realised that the cop broke the law by undertaking an illegal search, and that he could press charges against them if he had evidence. So Saleh teamed up with some developer friends to create an application that, should an incident like that occur again, could provide such evidence.

“The idea is that we all walk around all the time with the tools that we need to document our lives, [but] the only real reason we can’t is the amount of data that it encompasses,” Saleh said. “The truth is we know what we want to keep after the fact, we don’t know before.”

Referring to recent spate of incidents in the US of black men being assaulted or killed by police officers, Saleh said, “We’re seeing a lot of this more and more, but for every instance that is recorded, there are 10 that aren’t.”

The default setting on Alibi is to record audio – with a range of about six feet – and geolocation – pinged every 15 minutes – with no noticeable impact on battery life. If video recording is activated, however, that cuts battery life by up to 85%.

Alibi is available for Android from the Google Play store now. Though the app is ready for iOS, the Apple SDK prohibits background image and video recording, so iPhone users are set to miss out, for now.

Thank you Tech Republic for providing us with this information.