A real safety tool, not a recording app pretending to be one.
The features below are the ones that make TRS different from your phone's built-in camera. Each was designed for situations where recordings fail if stored locally, accessed by hostile parties, or routed through a single point of trust — whether that's a survivor needing the recording to survive an abuser, a young person needing a roadside recording to survive contact with whoever was on the other side, or anyone in a power-asymmetric moment where what you captured matters more than the device that captured it.
Start recording without unlocking, opening the app, or showing intent
You configure a multi-button or motion-and-button gesture that activates capture from anywhere — lock screen, sleeping device, in your pocket. Each user picks a gesture that's deliberate enough not to fire by accident, and unobtrusive enough that an adversary doesn't see you doing it. The composite design (the patented part) is what stops accidental activations and stops a thief or attacker from disabling capture by pressing one button.
Hidden-from-abuser configuration
For survivors and anyone in a coercive household, TRS can install without showing an app icon on the home screen. Setup happens through a biometric-gated hidden deep-link. Notifications can be suppressed or rerouted. The trigger gesture is reachable from the lock screen of an apparently empty phone. The whole flow is designed under the assumption that the person who might harm you can pick up your phone at any time.
For any moment where memory will be contested
Phones have been the most reliable witnesses of the last fifteen years. Some recordings changed how cases were investigated, how journalists covered events, how juries deliberated. Other recordings were lost — phones taken, devices destroyed, files sitting on a camera roll until they were deleted, accidentally posted to social media instead of saved. TRS exists for situations where the recording itself is the point: a traffic stop, a workplace confrontation, a roadside encounter, a school administrative meeting, a tenant-landlord dispute, a medical-care moment where the patient was alone. Anywhere two versions of what happened could end up in two memories, and only one of them was filmed.
The architecture is deliberately frame-neutral: it does not assume who you are recording or why. It assumes only that the captured recording deserves to outlast whoever might want it gone. That is true for a survivor and an abuser, a motorist and an officer, an employee and a manager, a tenant and a landlord, a patient and a provider. The same protection works in every direction.
Survives if your phone is taken
The architectural difference between TRS and your phone's built-in camera is what happens between the moment you start recording and the moment you stop. The camera saves to your camera roll — one local copy, on the device. TRS streams encrypted chunks off the device as you record, distributes them via threshold cryptography to your designated trusted contacts, and leaves no persistent plaintext on your phone after each chunk uploads. If your phone is confiscated, broken, or destroyed seconds after you started recording, the part that already streamed out is already safe.
Released only to the people you choose, only when you choose
You designate the people who should receive your recording — a parent, a lawyer, an advocate, a journalist, a witness, a coalition of trusted contacts. You set the rule for when it gets released: immediately, on a timer ("if I don't check in within 24 hours"), on a manual trigger from a trusted contact, or only if multiple trusted contacts agree. The math behind it (threshold secret sharing) means no individual contact — including us — can unlock the recording alone. If any single party is compromised, the recording stays sealed.
An optional visible indicator that warns the other person
For some scenarios — a confrontation that could de-escalate if the other person realizes they're being recorded — a clearly visible indicator is itself the safety feature. TRS gives you an indicator-on or indicator-off mode per recording, configurable in advance. For survivor scenarios, the indicator stays off. For public-safety scenarios where the deterrent value matters, you can choose to make it visible.
If you need help right now
TRS is a tool. It is not a substitute for professional help, emergency services, or the trained advocates who already exist to support you. If you are in immediate danger, please reach out to one of these resources directly.
- Emergency services: 911 (US)
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 · thehotline.org (24/7, free, confidential)
- RAINN (sexual assault): 1-800-656-4673 · rainn.org
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 (US/Canada/UK/Ireland)
- Trans Lifeline: 1-877-565-8860
- Trevor Project (LGBTQ+ youth): 1-866-488-7386
These resources are independent of Time Release Corporation. We list them because anyone considering TRS for safety reasons should know they exist.