Privacy
Short version: the camera never leaves your machine, and the website only measures you if you say yes.
What never leaves your device
Motion and sound detection run entirely in your browser. Video frames and audio are analysed locally and are never uploaded, stored on a server, or sent to us — there is no server of ours to send them to.
If you set up Telegram alerts, your bot token is kept in your browser's
storage and is used only to talk to api.telegram.org
directly. The site's Content Security Policy restricts outbound
connections to a short list of hosts, so even an injected script could
not ship the token somewhere else.
Bot commands, if you turn them on
The Runner has an optional setting called Reply to commands. It is off by default, and leaving it off keeps the behaviour described above: the page contacts Telegram only when it has a detection to report.
Turning it on changes two things, and you should know both. The tab
keeps a connection open to api.telegram.org so it can
receive messages — so there is ongoing traffic even when nothing is
happening. And your camera will take a photo, or record a few seconds
of video, in response to a message.
The bot can also start and stop detection — /arm and
/disarm — and report the current state. When it is on, the
Runner announces every change of state in that chat, including the ones
you make by clicking the button on the laptop.
Only the chat id you configured is obeyed; a command from anywhere else is ignored without a reply. Photos and clips go to that chat and nowhere else — they are not stored by us, because there is nowhere for us to store them. Whoever can post in that chat can ask your camera for a picture and can switch the monitoring off, which is why the bot should not be added to a group.
What the website measures
With your consent, this website loads Google Tag Manager, which in turn loads Google Analytics. That measures ordinary web usage: pages viewed, approximate location derived from IP, browser and device type, and how you arrived here. It tells us which parts of the project people actually use.
It does not — and cannot — see anything from the camera, the microphone, your detection events, or your Telegram credentials. Those never enter the page's analytics layer.
Whose data this is
Because nothing reaches us, nothing here is ours to hold or hand over. The recordings, the alerts and the Telegram chat belong to whoever set the camera up — and so do the responsibilities that come with pointing one at a place. Who counts as responsible, what counts as acceptable use, and the fact that the software comes with no warranty are set out on the Terms and responsible use page.
Contact
MySentryHome is free software kept by one person. Questions about this page can be sent through the support page.