About PRUF
A small, quiet place for real people.
Somewhere along the way, social media stopped feeling social. Feeds filled up with ads, bots and pictures nobody actually took. Every app wanted your name, your number and more of your time, and gave a little less back each year.
We wanted something simpler: a place where the people are real, the photos were taken by the person who posted them, and nobody is selling you to anyone. We couldn’t find it, so we started building it in Los Angeles.
The app
PRUF is a social app for iPhone. Here’s what it does today:
- Real people. Everyone who joins passes a live-person check with the iPhone’s camera, to keep bots out.
- Just a username. No name, email, phone number or password. You keep a recovery code in case you ever need to restore your account.
- Photos you actually took. Posts come from the PRUF camera, never from your camera roll. Each one carries details of how it was captured, which you can inspect.
- A darkroom for your shots. Edit your photos and videos with PRUF’s looks and tools before you share them.
- Your own vault. What you capture stays in a private vault on your phone, backed up to your own iCloud, encrypted.
- Two feeds. Pulse shows the people you’re connected to. The Square shows what people are posting near you.
- Private messages. Messages are end-to-end encrypted. We can’t read them.
- A safer feed. Every post is checked by our automated moderation before it appears.
- No ads. No ad profile, and we don’t sell your information.
The company
PRUF Systems Inc. is a small company in Los Angeles, California, and our technology is patent pending. We’re not a big tech company: there’s no ad business to feed and no data to sell. There’s a small team, and a beta full of early users helping us get it right. More about the company at prufsystems.net.
The team
- Khoi Diep Founder & CEO Former VP at an international EV startup. Designed PRUF’s architecture and built the iOS reference app.
- Son Le Co-Founder & CTO 25+ years of enterprise software architecture, database design and full-stack systems.
- Zach Howe Senior iOS Engineer Native iOS engineer who has built and scaled high-traffic consumer mobile platforms.
- Duc Huy Tran Advisor 30+ years of executive operating leadership across high-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies.
“I started PRUF because I wanted a quiet place for real people to share things they’ve actually taken, not things they saw or downloaded somewhere. It’s small and it’s in beta, and it gets better every week because of the people using it. If you try it, I’d love to hear what you think.”
Before you install
Installing an app from a company you just heard of takes trust. Here’s exactly what PRUF asks your iPhone for, and why:
- Camera: to take the photos and videos you post. When you join, and when you take a selfie, it also checks for a few seconds that a live person is there.
- Face ID: to unlock PRUF. Your iPhone checks your face, and PRUF only learns yes or no.
- Microphone: only while you’re recording a video or audio.
- Location: only while you’re using the app, and only if you say yes, to show the city on your posts. Say no and the app still works.
- Photos: only to save what you export into a PRUF album. To make that album, iOS may ask for access to your photos; PRUF doesn’t look through them.
PRUF never asks for your contacts, never tracks you across other apps, and never uses your location in the background. We keep no face data: the live-person check runs on your phone.
PRUF comes through TestFlight, Apple’s own app for testing new apps, and it has the same iPhone protections as any app from the App Store.
You can delete your account anytime in Settings, and it takes effect at once: your account, profile, posts and files are deleted. Our Privacy Policy covers the rest, in plain language.
Where we are
PRUF is in public beta on TestFlight: free, on iPhone, in the US, with room for 10,000 people. It’s early, and some things will break. When they do, tell us. A real person on our team reads every message.