Your camera may have recorded the one thing they need
A recorder outside your gate, your shop or your estate can hold the vehicle everyone is looking for. Nobody knows to ask you, and it records over itself within days. Ubonile is a way for the question to reach you, in private, when it is worth your time.
Why it matters, and why it is urgent
After a kidnapping, a hijacking or a robbery, one of the first questions at the police station is whether anyone has CCTV. In practice the victim is expected to walk around asking strangers, and in South Africa people do not open the gate for that. They are right not to.
The footage often exists. The problem is time. A recorder keeps its newest recordings by writing over the oldest, commonly within 7 to 30 days, and sooner on a small drive. Every day that passes is a day of footage lost somewhere.
You will only be asked when a live request covers your area, and when your footage is likely still there. You will never be asked to hand over anything. You look, and you choose.
Every request carries a footage clock: how many days have passed since the incident, out of 30. This is what a camera owner sees for something that happened 9 days ago, if their recorder keeps 14 days.
Your recorder probably keeps this for about 5 more days.
If you tell us how many days your recorder keeps, we can say how many days you have left for each request. If you do not, we show a general warning.
Exactly what we store about a camera
This is the whole list.
- A point on a 200 m grid
- The spot you choose is rounded to a square about 200 metres across when you save it. The exact spot is never stored, so two cameras in one street land on the same point.
- The kind of camera
- Home, shop or business, estate or complex, dashcam, or something else.
- How many days it keeps
- So we know whether a request is worth your time. You can leave it blank.
- The area name
- A suburb or town, like Kempton Park.
- A label, if you want one
- For example "Front gate". Only you can read it, and it is encrypted.
- Whether it is paused
- A paused camera is never asked.
What we promise about it
- There is no map. Nothing on Ubonile shows where cameras are, and nobody can browse a list of them.
- The investigating officer sees counts. How many cameras were asked, and how many checked, never where they are.
- Our staff see totals. Only for areas that have five or more cameras.
- Your phone or email stays encrypted. It is how we reach you, and nobody else sees it.
What we never do
- We never connect to your camera. No live feed, no remote access, no password.
- We never scan or recognise. No face recognition and no number plate recognition.
- We never take footage. You look at your own recorder and choose, every time.
- We never say yes for you. If you do nothing, nothing happens.
How it works for you
- 1
Register it once
Sign in with your phone or email, and tell us the kind of camera, roughly where, and how many days it keeps. - 2
Wait
Most months, nothing happens. You are asked only when a live request covers your area. - 3
Check
You get a private message with the question and the number of days left. You look at your recorder. - 4
Answer in one tap
Found something, checked and nothing, or remind me tomorrow. If you found something, you send it like anyone else, and you choose how much of you we know.
A practical guide
General steps that hold for most recorders. Menus have different names on different brands, so look for the closest match.
How to find out how many days your recorder keeps
- Open playback on the recorder, or on its app, and scroll back to the oldest day you can find a recording for.
- Count the days from that day to today. That is roughly how long it keeps.
- Check how it records. A recorder that records only when it sees movement keeps more days than one that records all day.
- If you cannot tell, the manual or the company that installed it can say. Some recorders also show their disk size and how much is used in the system or storage menu.
A camera that saves to a cloud service keeps what your plan allows, so check the plan in its app. A dashcam usually loops, replacing its oldest clips when the memory card is full. Many let you lock a clip so it is not replaced. A phone keeps a video until you delete it.
How to export a clip from a recorder
- Do it soon. Every day, older recordings may be written over.
- Write down the time shown on the recorder and the real time now. Recorder clocks are often a few minutes out, and the officer will need to know.
- Find the backup or export function in the menu. Choose the camera, the day, and a time range that starts about 30 minutes before the incident and ends about 30 minutes after.
- Save it to a USB stick. If the recorder will not recognise the stick, try another one. Many recorders only read sticks formatted as FAT32.
- If the recorder offers to copy a player along with the clip, say yes. Many recorders save in their own format, and the player is how it is viewed.
- Do not convert, edit or trim the file. Ubonile accepts common recorder formats as they are, including .dav and .h264.
- Keep the stick and the recorder's drive as they are, and send the file when you answer.
How to send a video from a phone
- Do not send it through a chat app first. Chat apps usually shrink videos and remove details like when and where they were recorded.
- Open the request link, choose to send footage, and pick the video from your phone's gallery or files, as it is.
- Do not edit or trim it. Keep the original on your phone, even after you have sent it, and turn off anything that deletes old videos automatically.
- If the phone's clock may have been wrong when you recorded it, tick the box that says so.
Ready to be asked properly?
It takes a minute. You can pause a camera or delete it whenever you like.