A cell phone application called "instantWitness"

This idea could improve the safety of millions of women (and men), and increase the effectiveness of criminal courts worldwide.

The scenario I have in mind is this.A woman finds herself followed by a stranger when walking home late at night. She then starts an application called "instantWitness" on her cellphone and records a voice description of the man, while at the same time taking his picture multiple times as he approaches. The data is immediately transferred to a remote server, and emailed to a list of other people (pre-selected by the woman), so there is no point in the hostile man taking/destroying the phone. As a crime would now with very high probability lead to capture, the stranger walks buy without touching her.

The application also has the following features- A "real emergency button" 911 (or 112 in Europe) that calls the police if the situation escalates. Possibly with a computer voice that reads/transfers the GPS position (or street address) to the 911-operator, and/or tells the operator where the uploaded images/files can be downloaded- A witness checklist for describing a person might appear during audio recording, so that the quality of the witness material is improved.- One could also imagine a more expensive version (paying per month of service) of the app with a call-center standing buy, with access to images, sound and GPS-position that could in turn call 911 and inform the police if the user is busy running, or unconscious, or worse.

The app can also come in handy for third person witnesses, being near a crime. If the police were able to access material from your server with geo-taggs near a crime-scene, and if those files could not be removed by the user himself/herself. It would be pointless for a criminal to try to scare a witness to silence. The witness report would already be out of reach for the witness.

Imagine if every other cellPhone user had this app in their pocket. The streets of the world would be a much safer place.

This idea has been halfheartedly implemented in the iPhone app "iWitness", but the implementation is not good enough to make it work.

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