Critter Cam privacy policy

This policy covers the Critter Cam app for iPhone and Android (listed as “Cheeto Cam” on the App Store) and the website cheeto.cam. They’re published by HOLLINGSWORKS LLC (“Hollingsworks”, “we”, “us”), a small software studio in Michigan run by Jesse Hollingsworth. Critter Cam is currently in private testing with invited households.

How Critter Cam works

Cameras at a home (a door camera, a porch camera, a yard camera) send pictures to a small computer next to them, which spots animals, recognizes known pets and writes a short description. All of that recognition runs on that computer at the home. The results go to a server we run ourselves, in Michigan, and the app shows them to the members of that home’s household: visits, history, charts, alerts and a live view.

What we collect

When you join or create a household

• A display name you choose (“How people will know you”), stored with your membership.
• A sign-in identity the app creates for you automatically, with no email address or password. The app keeps its session on your phone.
• Your membership: which household, your role (owner, manager or member) and when you joined.
• If you create a household: its name, time zone and invite code. If you set an owner recovery key, we store only a one-way fingerprint of it, never the key.

The household owner may also sign in with an email address and password.

What the cameras capture

• Photos. Each time a camera sees an animal it saves a photo (about 640 × 480) and a thumbnail, with the time, the camera, the weather at the camera’s location, a short caption, which animal or pet it thinks it is and how sure it is. Cameras point at doorsteps, porches and yards, so photos can include people who happen to be in view, such as visitors, delivery drivers, neighbors and passers-by. Critter Cam doesn’t try to identify people.
• Live view, sound and rewind. Household members can watch a live view. Where a camera has a microphone, the live view includes live sound, and members can replay the last 15 seconds of video and sound. The rewind buffer is kept only in the camera computer’s memory and is overwritten continuously. Nothing is recorded to disk unless a member saves a clip.
• Your feedback. If you confirm or correct which pet a photo shows, we record your answer and who gave it, to improve recognition.

On your phone

• Photos and clips you choose to save go to your phone’s photo library (or Pictures/Movies on Android), which is why the app asks for permission to add photos.
• The app uses your camera only to scan a household invite QR code, and only while the scanner is open. On Android, the code is read on the phone by Google’s ML Kit; the picture isn’t sent anywhere.
• A cache of recent photos, your settings, the last household code and name (for quick rejoining) and, on Android, the latest frame for the home-screen widget.

Notifications

If you turn on alerts, we store your phone’s push token with your account and household so we can alert you. On Android, alerts are delivered through Google Firebase Cloud Messaging. They carry only the household and camera ID, and your phone fetches the photo from our server. On iPhone, alerts are sent through Apple’s Push Notification service, and the app also starts the Firebase SDK, which registers the phone with Google. Turning alerts off, leaving a household or being removed deletes your push tokens.

What we don’t collect

Critter Cam has no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no payments. The app doesn’t use your location, contacts or your phone’s microphone.

Who can see what

• Members of a household see all of its photos, visits, charts, pet profiles and camera status, the live view (with sound where available), the invite code, and the member list (display names, roles and join dates).
• Owners and managers can also change the household’s alert settings, manage invites and roles, and remove members.
• The public. Photos, captions and visits from the Hollingsworth House household (our own cameras) are published in real time on cheeto.cam, with their history. New households are private, and the app has no option to make them public.
• How photos are stored. All photos are stored on our server at long, random addresses that aren’t listed anywhere. The app and website open them by those addresses, so anyone who obtains a photo’s exact link could open it. Please don’t share links to photos you want to keep private.

Services that handle data for us

• Cloudflare carries all traffic between the app or website and our server.
• Google Firebase (Cloud Messaging and Installations) delivers Android alerts and registers phones for push. It also hosts the cheeto.cam website.
• Apple Push Notification service delivers iPhone alerts.
• OpenWeatherMap receives the camera’s location to provide the weather recorded with each photo and shown on cheeto.cam.
• Wyze. One of our porch cameras is a Wyze camera, whose video passes through Wyze’s cloud service on its way to our equipment.
• Optional email and text alerts. If a household owner turns them on, alerts with photos are emailed through Google’s Gmail or sent by text message through mobile carriers’ email-to-text gateways to the recipients the owner lists.

Earlier versions. Until August 1, 2026, photos were sent to Google’s Gemini service to write captions; captions on older photos were written that way. Captions are now written only on the camera computer. Earlier versions also stored data in a hosted Supabase project, and could send alert photos through Pushover.

The cheeto.cam website also loads fonts and scripts from Google Fonts, jsDelivr and cdnjs, which receive visitors’ IP addresses like any website request, and stores a cache of recent photos in your browser.

How long we keep it

• Photos, captions and visits are kept until they’re deleted. We don’t delete them automatically at the moment.
• Server backups are kept for 7 days on the server and 30 days on our own computer.
• Live-view rewind exists only in memory for about 15 seconds.
• Push tokens are deleted when you turn alerts off, leave or are removed, or when Apple or Google report them as no longer valid.

Deleting your data

• Leave a household from the household screen to remove your membership and alerts. (An owner must transfer ownership first.)
• An empty household (one with no camera history yet) can be deleted from the app.
• To delete your account and your display name, or to ask us to delete particular photos (for example a photo of you), email hello@hollingsworks.com. We’ll confirm when it’s done, within 30 days.

Children

Critter Cam isn’t directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. Cameras may capture anyone who passes, including children. If you see a photo of your child and want it removed, email us and we’ll delete it.

Your rights

Depending on where you live (for example California, other U.S. states with privacy laws, the EEA or the UK), you may have the right to access, correct or delete your personal information, to object to processing, and to complain to your local data protection authority. We won’t treat you differently for using them. Email us and we’ll answer within 30 days.

Security

Traffic is encrypted between your phone and our server. The database only lets members of a household read its records, and only the camera computer can add photos. Live views need a household key. The server sits in a home in Michigan, so its security depends on our own measures rather than a large provider’s.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date at the top, and we’ll tell household members in the app about significant changes.

Contact

HOLLINGSWORKS LLC, a Michigan limited liability company
Email: hello@hollingsworks.com