Watchful

Privacy Policy

Effective 4 August 2026

1. What the app does with video and audio

Watchful turns two of your Apple devices into a baby monitor. The camera device captures video and sound; the viewer device plays them. This stream:

• travels only across your local network, directly between your two devices (WebRTC restricted to local candidates — no cloud relay, STUN, or TURN servers are configured, so the stream cannot leave your network);
• is end-to-end encrypted in transit (DTLS-SRTP);
• is never recorded, stored, analyzed, or transmitted to us or to any third party. Frames exist only in transit between your devices.

2. What stays on your devices

The app keeps a small amount of data on your device, for its own operation only. None of it leaves the device:

• your last chosen role (Camera or Viewer);
• a randomly generated device identifier used for pairing (not tied to you, your Apple ID, or your hardware);
• the fingerprints of devices you have approved, stored in the device Keychain, so a trusted viewer can reconnect without asking again.

Deleting the app deletes this data.

3. Permissions the app asks for

• Camera — to capture video on the camera device.
• Microphone — to capture the room's sound on the camera device, and to let the viewer talk back. The viewer's microphone is off by default and clearly indicated when live.
• Local network — so your two devices can find and stream to each other. This is the only "network" the app uses.

4. What we receive: nothing

We operate no servers for the app. We cannot see your video, hear your audio, count your sessions, or know that you use Watchful at all. Because no data is collected, there is nothing for us to sell, share, lose, or be breached of.

Two things happen outside the app that involve Apple, under Apple's privacy policy, not ours:

• If you opted in to sharing analytics with Apple (an iOS setting), Apple provides us aggregated, anonymized statistics (e.g. number of downloads, crashes). We receive no identifiers and cannot link anything to you.
• If a future version offers an optional in-app purchase, it will be processed entirely by Apple; we would never see your payment details.

5. This website

This website (not the app) counts page views and App Store link clicks using a first-party, cookieless counter: when a page loads, it increments an aggregate number. We do not use cookies, do not store IP addresses, do not fingerprint browsers, and cannot identify visitors. No third-party analytics or advertising scripts run here, and the site has no forms and collects no email addresses.

6. Children

Watchful is an app for parents and caregivers. It collects no data from anyone — including children. Since no video or audio ever reaches us, we never process a child's image or voice.

7. Changes

If we ever change what the app does with data, we will update this policy, the app's App Store privacy label, and say so plainly in the release notes — before the change ships. The current promise is simple: the app collects nothing.

8. Contact

Amin Benarieb · amin@benarieb.com