PHP · MySQL · Multi-platform clients · Private

Forensic Life Investigator

A SaaS platform and multi-platform client suite that reassembles a life from the data a person already carries — messages, locations, photos, payments, calls — into a single, searchable timeline. Built consent-first, from the ground up.

Vanilla PHP · MySQL 5 client platforms consent-gated immutable audit log Private repo

Consent is the whole point. A tool that can aggregate this much sensitive data is only responsible if privacy is the foundation, not an afterthought. This overview deliberately stays high-level — it describes the design philosophy and architecture, not implementation details.

The concept

Each of us scatters a detailed record of our lives across devices and accounts: texts, location history, photos with EXIF, payments, emails, and calls. Forensic Life Investigator — only with the explicit authorization of the person whose data it is — gathers that material and correlates it by time and place into one unified timeline you can actually search.

Consent-gated by design

The architecture treats authorization as a hard precondition, not a checkbox. Every data subject must have a recorded consent artifact on file before any ingestion is permitted, across three lawful modes:

Self — reconstruct your own timeline from your own devices and accounts.
Consented third-party — a loved one's timeline, with their explicit recorded consent (estate planning, caregiving, memorial).
Forensic / legal — investigators or attorneys acting under documented legal authority, with chain-of-custody.

Ingestion endpoints hard-fail when no active consent exists for a subject, and every access and ingestion is written to an immutable audit log. Privacy isn't a policy page bolted on at the end — it's enforced in the request path.

The architecture

Component	Role
Server	Vanilla PHP + MySQL API and web app (no framework), deployed on DreamHost
Clients	macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS — they extract data locally and push it to the API
Correlation	Unifies messages, locations, photos, payments, emails, and calls into one time-and-place timeline
CI/CD	GitHub Actions — build, test, deploy

It's an ambitious systems problem: five client platforms, a privacy-critical server, and a data model that has to make disparate sources line up coherently — all while keeping consent and auditability non-negotiable.

← Back to all projects