Legal
Terms of Service
These terms set out the agreement between you and Witnessed when you use the app. They are written to be read rather than skimmed past. There is nothing buried in here.
The short version. Witnessed records verifiable facts about a file: its contents, its time, its place. It does not decide who is right in a dispute, and it cannot promise how anyone else will treat your evidence. Your files stay in your iCloud. Apple handles the money. Nothing here takes away rights you have under UK consumer law.
Section 01The agreement
These terms are between you and Witnessed (“we”, “us”, “the app”). By downloading or using Witnessed you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the app.
Your use of the app is also subject to Apple’s standard End User Licence Agreement and the App Store terms, and to our Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement.
Section 02What Witnessed does
Witnessed captures photos, videos and audio recordings and produces an evidence certificate for each one. That certificate records:
- a SHA-256 cryptographic hash of the captured file;
- an RFC 3161 trusted timestamp token, obtained from an independent timestamp authority;
- the GPS coordinates available at the point of capture;
- the device model and operating system version.
Together these allow a third party to verify, using standard tools and without our involvement, that the file has not been altered since it was timestamped and that it existed at the time recorded.
Section 03What Witnessed does not do
We want to be direct about the limits of the service, because the whole point of it is honesty about evidence.
- It does not guarantee any legal or commercial outcome. Courts, deposit adjudication schemes, insurers and other decision-makers assess evidence on their own terms. We cannot promise that your certificate will be accepted, relied upon, or that you will win a dispute.
- It is not legal advice. Nothing in the app or on this website is advice about your situation. If a matter is significant, take advice from a qualified professional.
- It does not verify the truth of what is in front of the lens. A certificate proves that a specific file existed, unmodified, at a specific time and place. It does not prove that what was photographed is what you say it is.
- It cannot recover evidence you delete. Your files are in your iCloud account, not ours. If you delete them, we have no copy to restore.
Section 04Eligibility and your Apple ID
You must be at least 13 years old to use Witnessed, and at least 18 to make a purchase. The app requires an Apple ID with iCloud enabled in order to store your evidence. Keeping your Apple ID secure is your responsibility; anyone with access to it may be able to reach your evidence library.
Section 05Your evidence stays yours
You own everything you capture. We claim no rights over your photos, videos, recordings or certificates, and we do not licence them, analyse them or use them to train anything.
Your files are stored in your personal iCloud private database. We have no technical means of accessing them. This means we also cannot retrieve, restore or produce them, including if you or a third party asks us to.
Section 06Acceptable use
You agree not to use Witnessed to:
- record people in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, or otherwise in breach of privacy, data protection or surveillance law;
- create, present or represent evidence in a way intended to mislead a court, tribunal, insurer, adjudicator or any other party;
- harass, stalk, intimidate or threaten anyone;
- capture material that is unlawful to create or possess;
- reverse-engineer the app, interfere with the timestamping service, or attempt to generate certificates by any means other than normal use of the app.
You are responsible for complying with the law wherever you use the app, including obtaining consent where the law requires it before recording someone.
Section 07Plans, pricing and billing
- Free: three certificates per calendar month at no cost.
- Pay per certificate: £1.49 for an individual certificate, with no subscription.
- Pro: £6.99 per month for unlimited certificates.
All prices are in pounds sterling and include VAT where applicable. All payments are processed by Apple through the App Store; we never see or handle your payment details.
Pro subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period unless cancelled at least 24 hours before renewal, and are charged to your Apple ID. We may change prices for future periods, and where we do we will give you reasonable notice before the change takes effect so that you can cancel if you wish.
Section 08Cancelling and refunds
You can cancel a Pro subscription at any time in Settings → your name → Subscriptions on your iPhone. Cancelling stops future billing; you keep Pro access until the end of the period you have already paid for. Certificates you created while subscribed remain valid and verifiable permanently.
Refunds for App Store purchases are administered by Apple under its own policies, at reportaproblem.apple.com. If the app failed to do what it should have done, contact us as well and we will support your request.
As a consumer in the UK you normally have 14 days to change your mind about digital content. Where you ask for a certificate to be generated immediately, you are asking us to begin supplying that digital content straight away, and that right to cancel ends once the certificate has been issued. This does not affect your rights if the service is faulty, not as described, or not supplied with reasonable care and skill.
Section 09Third-party services
Witnessed depends on services we do not control:
- DigiCert issues the RFC 3161 timestamp tokens. It receives only a hash of your file.
- Apple provides iCloud storage, the App Store and payment processing.
- Sentry receives anonymised crash reports containing no evidence content.
These providers operate under their own terms and privacy policies. We are not responsible for their acts or omissions, though we will do what we reasonably can to help if one of them causes you a problem.
Section 10Availability and changes
We aim to keep Witnessed working reliably, but we do not promise uninterrupted availability. Timestamping requires an internet connection and depends on the timestamp authority being reachable; captures made offline are held and timestamped once a connection returns.
We may update, change or withdraw features. If we make a change that materially reduces what the app does for you, we will tell you in advance where we reasonably can. Certificates already issued are unaffected by any change to the app, because verification does not depend on us.
Section 11Liability
We do not exclude or limit our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, and for breach of your statutory rights as a consumer under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
Subject to that, we are not liable for losses that were not reasonably foreseeable, for business losses (including lost profit, lost contracts or lost opportunity), or for the outcome of any dispute, claim or proceedings in which your evidence is used or rejected. Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to the greater of £100 or the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.
You remain responsible for keeping your own copies of anything important. Export the files and certificates that matter to you.
Section 12Intellectual property
The Witnessed name, logo, app and website design, and the software behind them, belong to us. You are granted a personal, non-transferable licence to use the app in the ordinary way. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of our intellectual property to you, or yours to us.
Section 13Ending this agreement
You can end this agreement at any time by deleting the app. We may suspend or end your access if you materially breach these terms, most obviously by using the app to mislead a tribunal or to harass someone. Where we do, we will tell you why unless the law prevents us.
Certificates you have already created remain valid and verifiable regardless, because their verification does not run through us.
Section 14Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes fall to the courts of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in your own jurisdiction. Nothing here removes the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country in which you live.
Section 15Contact
Questions about these terms: support@witnessed.uk.
See also our Privacy Policy and Support page.