Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

StrangerAIert ("we", "our", "the service") provides a daily visit-report dashboard for Ring cameras. It uses face recognition to group visits by person and to filter out routine appearances from family and trusted people, so users can focus on visits that may need attention.

StrangerAIert is not a real-time alerting service. Motion events are received from Ring as they occur, but face recognition runs as a scheduled batch (once per hour) and push notifications are delivered only at three scheduled times each day (08:00, 18:00, 23:00 in the user's local time zone). Each push contains category counts for the previous time window; full visitor details are shown only on the dashboard.

This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and the controls you have over it. StrangerAIert is an independent Ring partner application and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ring or Amazon.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following categories of information, all tied directly to operating the service for you:

• Account credentials. Email address (obtained from Ring after you grant OAuth authorization) and a password you create for StrangerAIert. The password is stored only as a PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 hash with 310,000 iterations — the plain password is never persisted.
• Ring OAuth tokens. Access and refresh tokens received from Ring after you approve StrangerAIert during the in-app linking flow. We never receive or store your Ring password.
• Ring device metadata. Device IDs, device names, online status, and basic capability information obtained from the Ring partner API.
• Motion event metadata. Timestamps, camera identifier, and event type for each motion event Ring delivers via webhook.
• Camera media around motion events. Short video segments (typically a few seconds before and after a motion event) retrieved via Ring's WHEP live-stream API and/or cloud-clip download API, used for face/person detection and event display.
• Face data derived from your cameras. Cropped face images detected in your own camera footage, plus a numeric vector (face "embedding") computed from each image. These are stored under your account only and are used to recognize whether the same person appears again across visits.
• Person labels you create. Names or tags you assign to detected people (e.g. "family", "neighbor"), and the registration/exclusion status of each person.
• Session and usage information. Login session cookies, IP address and basic browser information used only to maintain your sign-in and protect against abuse.

3. How We Use Your Information (Purposes of Processing)

• To ingest and store motion events delivered by Ring webhook, including short camera clips for the period around each event.
• To run face detection, face embedding, and identity clustering on a scheduled batch basis (once per hour), so that visits of the same person across different events can be grouped together within your account.
• To compose your daily visit report — three time-windowed reports per day (overnight, daytime, evening) — and to send a push notification at the three scheduled times (08:00, 18:00, 23:00 in your local time zone) summarizing the visitor counts for the previous window.
• To filter people you have registered as Familiar from the report's visible list, and to always feature people you have added to your Watchlist.
• To automatically demote people you have repeatedly ignored (no detail card opened across multiple visit days) into the report's "Show more" bucket, and to suggest registration for frequently appearing unregistered visitors.
• To keep your Ring connection active by refreshing OAuth tokens before expiry.
• To respond to your support requests and protect the service from abuse.

We do not use your data to train shared machine-learning models across users, and we do not use it for advertising or profiling beyond the operation of StrangerAIert for you.

4. AI / ML Model Training and Data Usage

This section directly addresses common questions about how we use your data in connection with AI models.

• We do not use your data to train shared AI models. The face-detection, face-embedding, and clustering models StrangerAIert runs are pre-trained models from public research; we run them as inference only on your camera footage. We do not fine-tune these models with your videos, your face embeddings, your registrations, or any data derived from your account, and we do not aggregate user data to train any new model.
• Your face embeddings are used only for clustering within your account. Embeddings are stored only to recognize whether the same person reappears across your camera feeds. They are never combined with another user's data, never sold, never shared with model vendors.
• Never used by default — only with your separate opt-in. Unless you give the optional consent described in the next bullet, we do not use your videos, face images, or embeddings for any development or evaluation purpose. This opt-in is off for every account until the account holder turns it on.
• Optional consent — “Use of Videos to Improve the Service”. You may separately allow your videos and the face images extracted from them to be used to develop and improve the Service — for example, to measure recognition accuracy, tune detection thresholds, and evaluate new models. This consent is presented on its own, is never bundled into an “agree to all” action, and must be checked by you. Where you give it: access is limited to authorized personnel for those purposes, the material is never sold or shared for advertising, it is not used to identify you to third parties, and your existing retention period still applies — this consent does not extend how long anything is kept.
• Even with that consent, we do not train shared models on your data. The consent above covers measurement and evaluation. We do not fine-tune the recognition models with your data, and we do not aggregate user data to train a new model. If we ever intend to do so, we will ask for a further, clearly separate opt-in consent and disclose the change in this Privacy Policy before any such use.
• You can withdraw at any time. Settings → Help improve the Service, turn off. Withdrawal stops any further use from that point, and we delete the material that was used under the consent from the evaluation outputs it went into. We keep a record that the consent was given and withdrawn, and of what was used, so that the deletion obligation can be carried out and evidenced.
• Opting out never reduces your service. Declining or withdrawing this consent has no effect on detection, alerts, clustering, daily reports, or registrations — everything works exactly the same either way. It also does not affect other users, because your data is never combined with theirs.

5. Human Review of Customer Data

This section directly addresses when, if ever, a human at StrangerAIert may view your camera videos, images, or face data.

• Default — no human review. Routine operation of StrangerAIert (motion ingestion, hourly batch analysis, daily report generation, scheduled push notifications) is fully automated. No StrangerAIert employee or contractor views your videos, images, or face data as part of normal service.
• Exception — explicit user-initiated support. If you submit a support request that requires us to look at a specific event or person (for example, "this person is being misidentified as someone else"), our support staff may, with your written permission and only for the items you reference, access the specific event clip or face crops needed to diagnose the issue. We do not retain or copy this data after the support case is closed.
• Exception — security incidents and abuse investigation. If we have a good-faith reason to believe the service is being used to violate these terms or applicable law (for example, attempted access to another user's account), an authorized employee may review the minimum data necessary to investigate. Such access is logged.
• Exception — legal compulsion. Where required by valid legal process (see Section 8 — Data Sharing and Disclosure), authorized personnel may access specific data to respond.
• No human review for model improvement — unless you opt in. For accounts that have not given the optional “Use of Videos to Improve the Service” consent, we do not sample or review customer videos, face crops, or embeddings to improve, label, audit, or evaluate AI models. For accounts that have given it, authorized personnel may review that account's material for those purposes only, within the scope described in Section 4. That access is logged, and the consent can be withdrawn at any time in Settings.
• Support requests you initiate. When you submit a classification correction or ask us to investigate a mistake, the affected entry is kept so we can act on your request. It is reviewed only in response to your request.

6. How You Can Control and Review Your Data

You retain control over your StrangerAIert account data. From the in-app Settings tab you can:

• Review current service history. The dashboard exposes the motion events, recognized visitors, face crops, and source video clips that remain within the applicable customer-facing retention window. Derived processing artifacts are governed separately by Section 10 and are not a second customer-visible visit history.
• Delete specific people. Open a visitor's detail card on the People tab and tap Delete to remove that person's face crops, embeddings, and clustering record from your account.
• Delete all event data while keeping your login. Settings → Delete data (in the "Delete account or data" card). Type DELETE in the confirmation dialog to proceed. This wipes your full event history, face data, video clips, and registrations while leaving your sign-in available.
• Withdraw consent. Settings → Withdraw consent (in the "Delete account or data" card). This permanently deletes all of your Service data and stops all analysis; you cannot use StrangerAIert until you give consent again. Your account, sign-in, and Ring connection stay, so you can consent again at any time — data is then collected fresh, and previously deleted data is not restored. Withdrawing consent is not retroactive: it does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before your withdrawal.
• Delete the entire account. Settings → Delete account (in the same card). Type DELETE to confirm. This permanently deletes your StrangerAIert account, all face data, all motion event records, all video clips, all camera group settings, your active Ring OAuth tokens, and your sign-in itself.
• Per-camera recognition on/off. Settings → Cameras lists each camera with an on/off toggle. Turning a camera off stops StrangerAIert from analyzing that camera's motion events.
• Push notification opt-out. Settings → Daily Report Notifications toggles the three scheduled daily push summaries off across all of your devices while keeping the dashboard available.

7. Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR) and Privacy Rights

You have the right to:

• Access the information StrangerAIert holds about you. Most of this is directly visible in the in-app Settings and dashboard. If you want a packaged export of your records, see the email-based DSAR procedure below.
• Correct or update labels, registrations, and account information through the in-app interface.
• Delete individual people, individual events, all of your data, or your entire account — all available in Settings (see Section 6).
• Object to processing by disconnecting Ring or deleting your account; this stops all further processing of your data by StrangerAIert.
• Restrict processing by disabling specific cameras (Settings → Cameras) or push notifications (Settings → Daily Report Notifications).
• Receive a portable export of your event log and registered people upon request, in a machine-readable format (JSON).
• Lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority where you have such rights.

To submit a DSAR / access / deletion request that cannot be completed in-app: email support@smartaicam.com with the subject line "Privacy Request — [access | deletion | export | correction]" from the email associated with your StrangerAIert account. We respond within 30 days. If we need to verify your identity, we will reply from the same address to confirm.

8. Available Opt-Out Mechanisms

• Opt out of scheduled push summaries — Settings → Daily Report Notifications, toggle off. The dashboard remains available; only the push goes away. The opt-out applies across all of your devices immediately.
• Opt out of analyzing a specific camera — Settings → Cameras, toggle that camera off. Ring events for that camera are no longer analyzed.
• Stop seeing a specific person — on the People tab you can dismiss a visitor (suppresses them from reports and notifications), un-register a registered person, hide individual appearances, and delete individual photos. To remove stored face data itself, use Settings → Delete data (removes all analysis data for the account) or contact support@smartaicam.com to request removal of a specific person's data.
• Opt out of all data storage on this account — Settings → Delete data (login stays) or Settings → Delete account (full removal).
• Opt out of using your videos to improve the Service — Settings → Help improve the Service, toggle off. This is off unless you turned it on yourself. Turning it off stops any further use immediately and triggers deletion of the material used under that consent (see Section 4).
• Opt out of AI model training — not required, because we do not train models on customer data at all (see Section 4).

None of these opt-outs requires us to contact you, and none requires special review on our side. They all take effect immediately in-app.

9. Data Sharing and Sub-processors

We do not sell your personal information. We share information only as follows:

• Ring (Amazon). When you use StrangerAIert, your authenticated API calls (live stream, clip download, device list) go to Ring's API. Ring's own privacy practices apply to anything you do directly on Ring's platform.
• Infrastructure sub-processors. StrangerAIert relies on the following sub-processors strictly to operate the service:
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) — compute, storage (Amazon S3 for face/video assets, EC2 instance storage for application state), networking, and content delivery in the us-west-1 region. AWS processes data only as our infrastructure provider under its Data Processing Addendum.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) — sending of transactional emails such as password reset links. Only the recipient email address and the email content (no face data) are sent through SES.
  • Managed database hosting — service event records and analysis result records are stored in a managed database operated by our database infrastructure provider, which processes data only on our behalf.
  • Browser push delivery services (Google, Apple, Mozilla push gateways) — used to deliver web push notifications you opted into. Notification payloads are encrypted end-to-end (Web Push encryption); the gateways cannot read their contents.
  • Let's Encrypt — TLS certificate authority for HTTPS. No customer data is sent to the certificate authority.
• Legal compliance. We may disclose information when required by law, subpoena, or court order, or to protect rights, property, or safety.

We do not share your data with advertisers, brokers, analytics platforms, or AI model vendors.

9A. Regional Availability of Biometric Features (United States)

Face analysis — including face detection, face cropping, and the creation of face embeddings — is not provided for cameras located in Illinois or Texas, in light of state biometric statutes (Illinois BIPA; Texas CUBI). For cameras registered in those states the service records video only and creates no biometric identifiers. Enforcement is automatic based on the camera's registered location, which is collected during onboarding.

10. Data Retention

The rule is simple: data older than 90 days is deleted. The only exception is a person you registered yourself. We keep that exception because recognising a person you registered is the whole point of the Service, so we keep only what that requires — a few profile images so you can see who it is, and the face embedding so the Service can tell that person apart.

People you registered

• Profile images — up to 10 per camera. Kept so you can look at a match and judge for yourself whether it is the right person. We keep them per camera because a face looks very different from a front-door camera than from an overhead one, and images from a single camera would not let you recognise the person elsewhere.
• Face embedding. The numeric representation the Service uses to tell that person apart from other visitors.
• Identity settings (the category and the name you assigned).
• Everything else about that person — additional face crops, body crops, and their visit history — is deleted at 90 days like any other data.

When that exception ends

Whichever of these happens first:

• You remove the registration — anything already older than 90 days is deleted right away, and the rest as it reaches 90 days.
• Your subscription ends — deleted 90 days after you have no active subscription left.
• You remove your cameras — deleted 90 days after no camera remains connected to StrangerAIert.
• You disconnect StrangerAIert from Ring — deleted 90 days after the connection ends.

Removing a single camera while others remain connected does not delete the people you registered, because a registered person belongs to your account rather than to one camera.

Withdrawing consent or deleting your account is different: there is no 90-day grace period. All of your Service data, including registered people, is deleted straight away. See Section 7.

People you did not register

• Deleted after 90 days — images and embeddings alike. Visitors the Service grouped automatically, but that you never registered as Familiar or Watchlist, get no exception. Their face crops, body crops, and face embeddings are removed once they pass 90 days, and they stop appearing in Report, People, Video Quality, and person-detail history.

Rotated out

• Motion video clips in cloud storage (AWS S3): kept for 90 days, then deleted by a daily automated cleanup. The matching visit row in the database is marked anonymized at the same time (S3 URL set to NULL). You can also request earlier deletion at any time — see Section 7.
• Local source-video cache (the per-event mp4/webm cached on our server): kept for no more than 90 days, then deleted. Derived analysis artifacts follow the active-account and 90-day usage limitation described above.
• Webhook event audit log (the record of when each Ring camera reported motion to StrangerAIert): kept for 90 days, then auto-pruned. Ring itself removes motion video after about the same window, so older audit lines cannot be used to re-pull video and are removed to limit retention.
• Most recent sign-in security metadata (IP address and browser user-agent): retained while the account is active and cleared after 180 days of account inactivity. It is deleted immediately when the account is closed.
• Application + access logs: rotated at 10 MB each, 5 generations kept (~50 MB rolling). Older logs auto-deleted.
• Browser session cookie: 30 days of inactivity, then expires; you stay logged in if you visit at least once every 30 days.

Removed on user action

• Account information (email, password hash, time zone, country): removed when you delete your account (Section 7). You can delete your account at any time.
• Ring OAuth tokens: deleted when you delete your account or your data in StrangerAIert Settings. If you remove StrangerAIert from the Ring app, Ring invalidates the authorization and the stored tokens stop working; they are then removed by our routine cleanup.
• Push subscription endpoints: deleted when you disable notifications in Settings or close the account.
• Limited deletion evidence: after account deletion, customer content, credentials, and directly identifying account records are removed. A separately stored hashed record of signup, consent, and deletion timestamps — together with which version of this policy you agreed to, and without camera media or face data — may be kept for up to three years for legal, security, and deletion verification purposes, then automatically deleted.

11. Data Storage and Security

• Passwords are stored only as a salted one-way hash. We do not retain or recover the plain password.
• Ring OAuth tokens are kept server-side and used only to make authorized Ring API calls. They are never sent to the browser.
• Traffic between your device and StrangerAIert is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
• Camera video clips, face crops, and stored data are encrypted at rest on AWS cloud storage.
• Browser sessions use secure, HTTP-only cookies. Standard browser security headers are applied to every response.
• Ring webhook callbacks are cryptographically verified before any processing.
• Your data is scoped to your account at every API endpoint. Other StrangerAIert users cannot access your data.
• Security-relevant events (such as login attempts and administrative actions) are recorded in an internal audit trail. See our internal compliance controls for the framework-level overview.
• Administrative access to operational systems follows the principle of least privilege.

12. Changes to AI Capabilities

This section directly addresses how we inform you about changes to the AI features (such as new detection capabilities, accuracy improvements, or new model versions) that affect your data processing.

• Routine tuning. We continuously tune and improve the recognition pipeline (model versions, detection thresholds, grouping rules). Routine tuning does not change what data we collect or how long we keep it, and is not separately announced.
• Privacy Policy updates. If a change alters what data is processed, how it is processed, or how long it is retained, we update this Privacy Policy and the "Last updated" date at the top of this page, and notify you of material changes by email or an in-app notice.
• Accuracy and limitations disclosure. The signup consent screen contains an "AI Limitations and Accuracy Notice" describing the probabilistic nature of face recognition and the conditions under which accuracy can decrease (low light, profile views, occlusion, distant or motion-blurred faces). When we materially change accuracy claims or add a new capability that has different accuracy characteristics, we update that notice.
• Opt-in for net-new capabilities. If we introduce an AI capability that processes a category of data we did not previously process (for example, audio analysis or a new biometric modality), we require explicit user opt-in before enabling it for your account.

13. Camera Surveillance and the People in Your Footage

Some of the visitors and family members captured by your cameras may not be StrangerAIert users. StrangerAIert never contacts them directly. However, you are responsible for complying with the laws of your jurisdiction regarding video and biometric surveillance, including notice requirements. See the Terms of Service for additional detail.

14. Third-Party Services and Ring

StrangerAIert integrates with Ring (Amazon). When you choose to link your Ring account, you are also subject to Ring's privacy policy. Disconnecting in either system stops future data flow. The technical sub-processors used to operate StrangerAIert itself are listed in Section 9 (Data Sharing and Sub-processors).

15. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the new version on this page with an updated "Last updated" date. Material changes that reduce your privacy rights will be announced more prominently (for example, an in-app notice).

16. Contact Us

For privacy questions or to exercise your rights, contact us at support@smartaicam.com.