What is Locke?
Locke is a privacy-first document trust platform. Its whole reason for existing fits in one line:
Upload once → Share many times → Track forever.
People upload sensitive documents — passports, national IDs, degrees, certificates, employment letters, financial statements — and share them through Locke instead of email, WhatsApp, Drive, or Dropbox. The difference is that with Locke, the person sharing keeps control after they hit send.
The core guarantees
When a document is shared through Locke:
- View-only. Recipients see the document but never get the original file and never get a download button.
- Watermarked per session. Each viewing session is stamped with a unique watermark — viewer name, purpose, timestamp, session ID, synthetic document ID, and sensitivity label — burned into the page pixels server-side. It is not a client-side overlay that can be stripped.
- Audit-logged. Every access is recorded. The owner can see who looked at what, and when.
- Revocable. Access can be revoked, paused, or expired instantly.
Documents are rendered to page images server-side and served as watermarked images — the clean original stays owner-private and is never sent to a recipient.
Why this matters for enterprises
Enterprises constantly ask people to hand over sensitive documents:
- Universities verifying admission documents.
- Employers running employment and identity verification during onboarding.
- Landlords / property managers checking tenant paperwork.
- Anyone doing KYC-style identity or visa checks.
Today that means documents get emailed around as attachments, copied into shared drives, and stored in systems that then have to be secured, retained, and eventually deleted. Every copy is a liability.
Locke inverts the model. Instead of collecting documents, you request them:
- You ask a subject (an applicant, employee, or tenant) for specific documents, for a stated purpose.
- The subject approves in the Locke app.
- You read the result as a grant — a hosted, watermarked, view-only session.
No files ever leave Locke. You review what you need without ever taking custody of the original, which means there is nothing for you to store, secure, or dispose of.
Where the pieces live
Locke has three surfaces an enterprise touches:
| Surface | What it is |
|---|---|
| Partner API | The machine interface — create document requests, poll for results, mint watermarked viewing sessions. This is what you integrate against. |
| Partner Console | The web app where humans in your org manage the account, verification, DPA, and API keys. |
| Locke app | The consumer app (iOS, Android, Web) where subjects upload documents and approve your requests. |
The rest of these docs focus on the Partner API — how your systems connect to Locke.
Next: How integration works →