Witness terms of use

Effective 9 September 2026.

These are the terms on which Apertrue Ltd (staging) provides Witness. They are written to be read. Where a sentence promises something, the software is built to keep it.

1. What Witness is, and what it proves

Witness provides camera enrolment, live-call verification, and evidence a counterparty can check in their own browser. It proves that the video on a call came from a specific enrolled camera on a specific machine belonging to a passport-verified person, and how recently that was checked. When you choose, it also shows your verified name and a proven work address.

It does not claim more than that. It is not a guarantee against every form of deception, and where a check did not run, the page says so rather than filling the gap. Every public description of what Witness proves is held to the same ceiling as the software, and if any of our material ever claims more, tell us and we will treat it as a defect.

2. Accounts

• One account per email address. Sign-in is by passkey or by Google. There are no passwords.
• You are responsible for the devices that hold your passkeys, and for vetoing an identity recovery you did not start. Recoveries are deliberately slow, and we notify the account when one begins so it can be stopped.
• Your account holds nothing cryptographic. Your identity, your devices and your receipts are separable from it by design, which is what lets you delete it cleanly.

3. Plans, trials and payment

• Individual covers one person: your passport identity, your camera on your own devices, receipts kept on your Mac, and the claims you choose to show on a call.
• Organisation covers a team: a platform fee, protected seats for members, and sponsored verification for people outside the organisation, paid per head or from prepaid packs.
• Enterprise is an annual contract on the same meters, with its own agreement.
• Checking someone else's call is always free and needs no account.
• Prices, in pounds sterling, are shown on the account page and at checkout at the time you subscribe. VAT is added where it applies. We give at least 30 days' notice of a price change to existing subscribers.
• Every new account and every new organisation starts with a 30 day trial. Subscriptions are billed through Stripe, monthly or yearly, and can be cancelled from the billing portal at any time; a cancelled plan runs to the end of its paid period.
• If a payment fails, Stripe retries on its schedule. If the subscription ends, the account keeps working for a further 30 days, after which it cannot start verified calls until it subscribes again. Nothing cryptographic is revoked by a billing change: your identity, your enrolment and your saved receipts remain yours.

4. Sponsored verification

• An organisation may invite a person outside it to verify their calls at the organisation's expense. The invitation names the organisation and its reason before the person accepts.
• While a sponsorship is active, the organisation receives the receipts of that person's verified calls, and nothing else about their account. The person's calls carry a line naming the sponsor.
• Either side can end a sponsorship at any time. The organisation may keep the receipts filed under it for 90 days after it ends, after which we delete them.
• The organisation is responsible for having a lawful reason to ask, and for how it uses what it receives.

5. Organisations

• An organisation's administrators control its membership, its API keys, its sponsorships and its billing, and are responsible for who they admit and what those people do with it.
• API keys identify the organisation to the service. Keep them secret; revoke any that may have leaked.
• An organisation with no members dissolves. An administrator who is the only one must hand the role on before deleting their own account.

6. Acceptable use

Do not attempt to enrol a camera you do not control, to defeat or misrepresent the verification of anyone, to present a verification result as something it does not say, or to probe or overload the service. We may suspend or refuse service where we reasonably believe it is needed to protect the integrity of the registry or of other people's verification, and we will say why.

7. Availability and support

• Verification of a saved receipt is self-contained in the checker's browser. Our service being unavailable does not falsify evidence already produced.
• We do not offer a service level agreement on the self-serve plans. Enterprise agreements state their own.
• Support is by email at support@apertrue.photo, and a person answers.

8. Your data

How we handle personal data is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms. The companies that process data for us are listed on the sub-processors page.

9. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Subject to that, our total liability to you arising from Witness in any twelve month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period, and we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business or indirect loss. Witness is a verification aid; decisions taken on a call remain the decisions of the people on it.

10. Changes and ending

• We may change these terms. Changes that matter are emailed to account holders at least 30 days before they take effect, and the date at the top of this page changes.
• You may end this agreement at any time by cancelling and deleting your account. Leaving is designed to be clean: cancel in the billing portal, delete the account from the account page (which needs your passkey), and uninstall the app and camera extension from your Mac. What remains is the blinded, append-only transparency log, which identifies nobody.
• We may end it, with notice and reasons, for breach of section 6, or if we cease to provide Witness, in which case we will give at least 90 days' notice and keep the export and deletion tools working until the end.

11. Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction, without taking away any protection you have as a consumer under the law of where you live.

12. Contact