Overview

Your cameras stay where they were – on your own network. The cloud does not put itself between them and you – it introduces you to the camera and then gets out of the way.

Who takes part

A camera running OpenIPC. The agent lives on the camera itself, and the camera joins the cloud network on its own – a full participant with its own address. Everything it answers on at home it answers on here: video, ONVIF, its settings.

You. The app and the browser never join the network, and they do not need to: the cloud hands them the video and brokers a connection to the port of the camera you asked for, once it has checked that you are allowed it.

What the cloud sees, and what it does not

The coordinator – the part that introduces you to the camera – never sees video. It knows which devices you have, what their keys are and who has allowed what to whom; the picture does not pass through it.

When a direct path between you and the camera does not come up – and in some networks it never does, which is normal – the video goes through the relay. It carries it and stores nothing: no recordings, no frames. Passwords for your cameras' ONVIF and SSH are not in the cloud. The one exception is the RTSP login and password, if you set them yourself so the relay can pull the stream; those are stored encrypted.

Everyone gets their own network

Registration gives you a network of your own, and everything you connect lands in it. Other beta testers' cameras never appear in it, and yours never appear in theirs – and that is not a setting that can be weakened by accident: traffic between different networks is not forwarded.

Sharing a camera is explicit: a grant on one device. Your guest sees exactly what you gave them and nothing else.