This App Constantly Records Everything Your Phone Sees and Hears

​There has perhaps been no technological development that has changed  ​police-citizen interactions more than the omnipresent smartphone, ready to record any run-ins at a moment's notice. But all that recording comes at a price to your battery—certainly a protester has lost some footage thanks to his or her phone shutting down.

With that in mind, app developer ​ Jeff Myers designed Alibi, which constantly records your smartphone's location data, turns on the microphone, and snaps photos every few seconds—for hours at a time and without significantly draining your battery.

"We wanted this to not at all inhibit your experience with the phone, we wanted you to be able to leave it on for the entire day," Myers told me. "If  ​you're protesting the Eric Garner case, we want you to be able to take video and audio without it touching the battery life significantly."

​

Myers says microphone audio is highly compressed and photos are taken without a flash and without opening any sort of camera app (and without opening the viewfinder at all). Location data is merely a text file. Video is still somewhat problematic: Myers says there's no good way to constantly record it without killing the battery (Alibi can record video, but he makes no battery life promises).

The app is designed to be kind of like a "DVR for your phone," he said. You can leave it running the whole day and save the last hour of data at any time. After an hour, the stuff recorded previously is overwritten and wiped clean unless you specifically save it.

In my tests with it, the app is indeed easy to use and didn't seem to kill my battery any more than usual. The question, I suppose, is who exactly is going to use it. Myers says he originally designed the app so that police officers could use them as body cameras. But if police need something on them constantly, a dedicated device seems better.

Meanwhile, it seems like the app could be easily abused by someone seeking to clandestinely record someone else. There's no indication that anything is being recorded, no notifications that it's on, no camera flashes or anything. Microphone audio can be picked up pretty well if you toss it in your pocket and walk around with it all day.

Myers notes on the app's website that Alibi "seeks to provide evidence of any situation from police interactions, bullying, vehicle accidents, altercations, arguments, workplace harassment, legal disputes, and much more. It gives users the confidence to stand up for themselves in the face of misguided authority or misplaced aggression. Never be without an alibi."

That surely is a noble goal, but you can imagine how people might want to record others who aren't doing anything wrong without them knowing it.

"We designed this for the heat of a protest or if you're involved with an authority," Myers told me. "We don't want to encourage people to use this to clandestinely record people, and we hope they comply with the consent laws in different states."