Keeping evidence of abuse on your iPhone

Saving threats, photos and messages when you may be monitored. Safety comes first, and an advocate can help you decide how and where to keep them.

Talk to someone first, if you can

In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline answers around the clock at 800-799-7233, by chat at thehotline.org, or by texting START to 88788. The National Sexual Assault Hotline is at 800-656-4673. These are free and confidential. If your phone might be monitored, use a phone or computer your partner has never had access to, such as a friend’s or a library’s.

Trust your read of the situation. NNEDV’s Safety Net project puts it plainly: when abusers know a victim is documenting, the abuse can escalate, and you should do what is safest for you.

What to record

Safety Net suggests a log of each incident with:

• Date and time
• Where it happened, or a link to the post
• Any witnesses
• The technology involved
• A short description of what the person did
• Any report you made, with the officer’s name and date

It also suggests saving threats and messages instead of deleting them, and taking a screenshot of the contact page to tie texts to a phone number. For email, keep the original, since a forwarded copy loses identifying details. Text messages can disappear when a phone runs low on space, so capture them.

Where to keep it

Look at the risks of each place:

• Your photo library is where screenshots go by default. Anyone with your passcode can open it, and iCloud Photos copies it to other signed-in devices.
• A shared Apple Account or Family Sharing may expose more than you expect. Run Safety Check when it is safe to do so.
• A new email account that only you know, opened on a safe device, can hold copies away from your phone.
• A trusted person can keep printouts or a drive. Paper does not sync.
• A vault on your phone, such as Backroom, keeps someone scrolling your Photos from finding the pictures. If they check your apps, they can see it installed, and they could pressure you to open it. Backroom has no duress mode. Its only copy is on that phone and in any backup, so it should not be your only copy of anything.

If your partner takes the phone, evidence stored only on it goes with it. That is the main reason to keep a copy elsewhere.

Apple accounts and devices

Apple’s guide warns that changes to sharing may be noticed by others, and that you may want to record suspicious activity before you change settings. Once you have a plan, Safety Check under Settings, then Privacy & Security, can review or end sharing.