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Comment by tonywebster | Hacker News Reader

I love this concept, and it is sorely needed. I read in your Medium post[1] that “Data is wiped from the phone as soon as it’s securely moved to the Witness servers.” I'm curious what the reasoning for this is. Of course, I get that the data is streamed/copied to Witness in the event that the device is destroyed or confiscated, but it's hard for me to think of a use case where having a local version on the device would would do any harm.

In fact, I think it would be valuable for evidentiary purposes to have the original on the device. I'm assuming that the streamed/copied version is probably lossy in some regard, while the local version might be higher resolution or frame rate, also.

[1] https://medium.com/@marinosbern/witness-livestreaming-for-em...

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I just watched this documentary "Point and Shoot" [1], the guy filmed all over Africa, including Libya, and at one point was taken prisoner where he said his footage could have been used to identify other members of the Libyan resistance. It isn't hard for me to imagine a situation where you don't want to give the authorities visual evidence of who was at an event or who you were standing with.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_and_Shoot_(film)

Thanks for pointing this out. The original thinking was twofold: 1) I didn't want people to get in trouble if their phones were searched and they were in possession of a recording and 2) Keep the data stored on the phone to a minimum, in order to increase available space for storing video when Cellular Data/WiFi is not available. The data is always available later through the shortlink.

You raise a very good point though. Offering an option to keep data locally (or save it in the camera roll) in a future version would make sense

Might be worth clarifying that the project is separate from the work of the well known human rights and video NGO called "Witness" (www.witness.org). They make a number of video tools so a user might be confused.

At the border US customs ask you whether you have "accounts on remote computers", which means, practically everything. It's better to move the data offsite so police actually needs a warrant to inspect it (instead of a "I thought he had a gun" excuse), but it can still require them to provide access to the remote account to the police.

Interesting. Have you been asked that before? I've done a fair amount of going in and out of the country and was never asked

> but it's hard for me to think of a use case where having a local version on the device would would do any harm.

Hostile environments. It becomes incriminating evidence against you (think recording police brutality or excessive uses of force).

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