Smart Security Camera
Your PC's camera, your storage, your rules.
A Windows app that turns the webcam of a PC into a home security camera, and a phone app that lets you watch it from anywhere. Recordings stay on the PC. Nothing leaves it unless you switch that on yourself.
Microsoft Store: private beta Google Play: private beta iPhone: later.
What the Windows app does
- Records on the PC. Continuously or only when something happens, into a size-capped ring buffer with five seconds of pre-roll. A 24-hour timeline you can scrub, a list of the day's events, a player.
- Understands what it sees, on the PC. Motion, then people, pets and vehicles, told apart by a model that runs on the device. Faces of your household, so it can stay quiet for them. Night vision through the infrared camera. No frames are sent anywhere for any of this.
- Your own cloud, if you want it. Off by default. Event clips can go to a folder the app creates in your Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox or iCloud Drive, or to any folder. A private mode encrypts clips on the PC before they upload; the recovery phrase stays with you.
- Optional AI, with your own key. Off by default. With your own Anthropic API key and a monthly budget it describes events in a sentence, follows rules you write in plain language, answers questions about the day and sends a morning digest. A few still frames per event, never continuous video or audio.
- App lock. Windows Hello to open the window; recording continues underneath.
- No account needed for any of the above, no telemetry, no crash reporting.
Watch from your phone
Sign in with Google, Microsoft or Apple, or scan a pairing code shown by the PC, and every camera of your account appears on the phone. Tap one to watch live, listen, hold a button to talk through the PC's speakers, capture a picture, record a clip, or sound the siren. Event notifications reach the phone; the Events, Timeline and Gallery tabs read what the PC uploaded to your own cloud.
Share a camera by link or QR code. People you invite can watch, listen, talk and get notifications; they cannot sound the siren, and removing them replaces the keys.
End-to-end encrypted. The PC makes a camera key and hands it only to the phones allowed to watch, each copy wrapped to that phone's own key. The relay in between forwards bytes it cannot read, and the service behind this website stores no video, pictures or recordings, ever. Live video, sound, talk-back and the preview stills are all protected this way.
Privacy in one breath
- Nothing leaves the PC by default.
- Your cloud, not ours: uploads go to an account you own.
- The relay cannot see your video; the service holds account and camera names, never media.
- No telemetry. Logs carry no e-mail addresses, file paths or tokens.
The full privacy policy and the terms of use.
Questions people ask
- What do I need?
- Windows 11 and a webcam. About 25 MB for the app plus the recording space you choose. Cloud upload and AI need an internet connection and your own accounts with those providers.
- Does it cost anything?
- The apps are free during the private beta. AI features use your own Anthropic key, billed by Anthropic to you, within the budget you set.
- Do I have to sign in?
- No. The PC works entirely on its own. Signing in is only for watching from a phone, browsing history there and getting notifications.
- What does the service store when I do sign in?
- Your account (provider, a hashed subject, e-mail, 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 with the camera keys wrapped to them, which it cannot open. Deleting the account in the app removes all of it at once.
- Can someone at the relay watch my camera?
- No. Frames are encrypted on the PC with a key the relay never receives. The relay sees only that bytes are flowing.
- The phone says the PC is offline.
- The PC streams only while it records, and only with Remote view switched on in its Settings. Check both, then that the PC has internet access.
Contact
Questions, bug reports and privacy requests: github.com/musados/SmartSecurityCamera/issues. A contact form will replace this once the full site ships.