Questions people ask
The Windows app works on its own, with no account and no connection. Everything below says what changes when you switch something on.
Not for the Windows app. It records, detects, keeps its timeline and locks itself with Windows Hello without any account, and it works with no internet connection at all.
You sign in — with Google, Microsoft or Apple, or by scanning a pairing code the PC shows — only when you want to watch from a phone, receive event notifications there, or share a camera with someone.
In a folder you choose on the PC, inside the size cap you set — by default Videos\Security Camera. The oldest are deleted first when the cap is reached. If you turn on cloud upload, event clips are copied to a folder in your own cloud account as well.
You share any camera of your PC — or all of them, including ones added later — with a person by e-mail, as a viewer or as family, for as long as you choose. A viewer watches live, listens, sees the stills and gets the event notifications. Family can also hold to talk, sound the siren, move the camera and start a recording. Nobody you share with can change settings, read your history, ask the assistant or share with anyone else.
You see who can see your cameras, their devices, and what they did — who watched and for how long, the siren, invitations and removals — on the PC’s Sharing page and in its audit log. Removing a person, or one of their devices, replaces the camera key, so a phone that lost access cannot decrypt anything sent after that moment.
Windows 11 and a webcam. The app itself is about 25 MB, plus the recording space you allow it. Cloud upload and the AI features additionally need an internet connection and your own account with those providers.
The apps are free during the private beta. The AI features run on your own Anthropic API key and are billed by Anthropic to you, never above the monthly budget you set in the app.
No. Motion detection, the person / pet / vehicle detector and face recognition all run on the PC. No frame is uploaded for any of them, and face data never leaves the device.
No. The PC generates a camera key and hands it only to the phones allowed to watch, each copy wrapped to that phone’s own public key. Live video, sound, talk-back and the preview stills are encrypted with it before they leave the PC. The relay forwards bytes it cannot read, and the service stores no video, pictures or recordings, ever.
Your account (the provider, a hashed subject, e-mail address and display name), your devices’ names and push tokens, your PCs and cameras by name and whether they are online, who you shared with, and your phones’ public keys together with the camera keys wrapped to them, which it cannot open. Deleting your account from the app’s settings removes all of it at once.
When the room is dark the app switches to the PC’s infrared camera, if it has one. Detection and face recognition keep working on the infrared image.
Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or any folder on the PC — an iCloud Drive folder included. The app asks for the narrowest permission each provider offers, so it can only see the files it created itself. Private mode encrypts every clip on the PC first with AES-256-GCM; the recovery phrase stays with you, and without it nobody, us included, can open them.
The PC streams only while it is recording and only with Remote view switched on in its Settings. Check both, then that the PC has an internet connection and is not asleep.
No. The AI features are off until you add your own Anthropic API key. When they are on, a few still frames and short text per event go from your PC to Anthropic under your own account and their terms; nothing goes to us.