What SKOPEIN records, and where it goes

On this page

• Whose footage this is
• What stays, and what leaves
• Parts of a picture we black out
• Where the pictures go
• How long anything is kept
• What we never do
• Who can look
• What we hold about you
• What the business must do
• Asking for a copy, or a deletion
• What this is not
• When this page changes

Whose footage this is

The cameras belong to the business that installed them. The footage is the business's, and it stays the business's. SKOPEIN is the thing that watches those cameras on the owner's instructions and holds a small part of what it saw so he can look at it later.

So if you were recorded and you want something done about it, the business running the cameras is the one who decides · not us. Write to them first. If you write to us instead we will pass it on and help them do it, but we will not hand somebody else's footage to a stranger, and you would not want us to be the kind of company that did.

What stays, and what leaves

The watching happens on a small computer standing next to the recorder, in the building. The live picture never leaves. There is no live view in this product · no screen anywhere, for you or for us, that shows a camera as it is happening. What the support people here do hold, so that a site can be set up and fixed, is the camera's address on your own network and the recorder's password · the same two things your installer holds. It is a handful of people and it is used for support; said plainly, because a promise about a missing button would be the easier sentence and not the true one.

These are the only pictures and videos that ever leave the building. The list is the whole list:

• A short video of a reported incident. About twenty seconds, and it starts a few seconds before the moment itself, because the computer keeps a rolling loop of the last little while.
• One picture of that incident, with the time printed on it.
• One picture of an event that was turned down. When something moved and the answer came back "that is not what you asked about", we keep a single small picture so the owner can see what he was not woken for. There is never a video with these.
• One current picture per camera, about once a minute, so the console can show what each camera is looking at, and so that when somebody writes a question for a camera, the AI service can be shown the view it will be asked about. Each one replaces the one before it · only the newest exists, and there is no history of them.
• The pictures needed to answer a question. When something moves and the owner has asked a question about that camera ("nobody should be at the back door after 6pm"), the picture of that moment goes out to be judged, sometimes with a close crop of the part that matters, together with the owner's question in his own words.
• Counts and times, with no pictures attached: when something moved, that a person was seen on that camera at that second and how sure the computer was, which hours each camera was watched, and how many movements were set aside without being looked at and why.

When a camera is set to plain movement watching, with no question attached, no picture leaves at all · only the fact that something moved.

Two things that are not pictures, and should be said anyway

The camera's address on the business's own network, and the recorder's password if it needs one, are held here so that a replaced computer can be set up again without an engineer. They are stored scrambled, they are never shown to another customer, and they are never in a file that travels: the setup file a customer can download has them stripped out.

And every minute the computer sends a short health report · which cameras it can see, whether its own eye is working, how many questions it asked today. That is what makes "nobody is watching this site" a message you receive rather than something you find out afterwards.

Parts of a picture we black out

A camera aimed at a doorway often catches something nobody meant it to: the neighbour's window, a keypad, a desk with papers on it, the pavement outside. Rectangles of the picture can be blacked out for good.

They are blacked out twice: once as the picture arrives inside the computer, and again on every picture on its way out. If the blacking-out ever cannot be applied · a missing video component, say · the picture is not sent at all. Withholding a picture is always the safer failure, and that is the way round the software fails.

Where the pictures go

Cloudflare

The website, the console, the database and the storage that holds the clips and pictures all run on Cloudflare. That is where the evidence sits until it expires.

An AI vision service

The judging is not done by us. The picture, the crop and the owner's question go to an outside AI vision service, which answers in one line: yes, no, or "these pictures do not settle it". We do not name the company on this page because the one we use can change; what does not change is that it is an outside service and that we buy our access to it through a reseller, so the picture passes through the reseller's servers on its way there and back.

The same service is asked one thing that is not a judgement. When somebody writes or rewords a question for a camera and saves it, that camera's current picture goes out once with the words they typed. What comes back is the sharpened wording that camera will be judged on, plus a plain warning when the camera's view will struggle with it. This happens when a question is saved, not when something moves.

We send the smallest thing that answers the question, and we send nothing about who anybody is · no name, no account, no history, just a picture and a sentence. What that service keeps on its own side is governed by its own terms, not by ours, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on this page.

The alert itself

An alert goes to the people the owner chose, by the way each of them picked. On Telegram the picture arrives in the chat, and the video follows it a few seconds later. By email, the alert names the camera, the time and the reason, and links to the player in the console · which asks for a sign-in before it will show anything.

How long anything is kept

• Clips and pictures of incidents: 90 days. That is not a policy somebody has to remember · the storage itself carries a rule that deletes evidence at ninety days old whether anybody asks or not, so nothing survives it. A business can ask us for a shorter window than that, and then the console stops showing its evidence at its own number · the file itself is still deleted by the storage at ninety days, the same rule as everybody else's. Either way, once the time is up the console says the evidence has expired rather than showing a player that would never load, and we would rather say so than leave you clicking.
• Pictures of turned-down events: 30 days. The written record and the small picture both go · that one is sixty days shorter than the storage rule above, so it is done by the program itself every night rather than left to the storage.
• The written line of an incident · the time, the camera, what it said and why · is the business's own history, and it stays on the account until somebody asks us to remove it. The picture and the video inside it still expire on the dates above.
• Counts with no pictures · which hours a camera was watched and how many questions it asked · are kept about thirteen months, so a bill and a quiet week can still be explained a year later. The counts of movement that was set aside without being looked at, and why, are kept 90 days.

What we never do

• No face recognition. No face templates, no measuring a face, no matching one face to another face, to a name, to a different camera or to a different day. There is nothing in the product that could do it and nothing stored that it would need.
• No identity. The computer's own eye knows "that is a person" and nothing more. The questions asked about a picture are the sentences the owner typed, and they are about what is happening · somebody at a door, a spill on a floor, a missing hard hat · not about who somebody is.
• No selling and no sharing. We do not sell footage, rent it, hand it to advertisers or give it to anyone outside the short list above. If we were ever ordered by a court to hand something over we would comply, and we would tell the business it belonged to unless we were forbidden to.
• No tracking. No advertising cookies, no analytics scripts, no third-party tags on the website or in the console.
• No live watching. Nobody, here or anywhere, sits looking at your cameras.

Who can look

The people the business invited to its own account, and nobody else's. Every request for a picture or a clip is checked against the account it belongs to before a single byte is read, so a customer who guessed another customer's link still cannot open it. A brand-new account cannot see anything until we switch it on by hand · which is there so that signing up is not the same thing as being let in.

What we hold about you

If you have an account

Your name, your work email, your phone number if you gave us one, and, if you set one, your password stored scrambled in a way that cannot be turned back · we could not tell you your own password if you asked.

Two cookies, and no more. skopein_session keeps you signed in. g_state is set only while you are signing in with Google, lasts ten minutes, and exists for one thing: proving the sign-in that comes back from Google is the one you started.

When you sign in to an account that has no language yet, and whenever you change the language inside the console, the choice is kept on your account as well, so a new phone opens the console in it. Your own browser also remembers, on your phone or computer and not in a cookie, how you like these pages to look (dark or light, and whether transparency is reduced) and which language you read them in.

If you signed in with Google

You can make the account with Google instead of choosing a password. Google then tells us your name, your email address, and whether Google has itself verified that address · nothing else, and never your Google password. There is no password of yours on our side at all in that case. Google learns that you signed in to SKOPEIN, on their terms rather than ours. If you would rather they did not, use the email and password form on the same page.

If you asked for a demo through the website

What you typed into that form: your name, email, company, phone, what kind of site you have, roughly how many cameras, and what you want watched. Along with it we keep your browser's description of itself and a scrambled version of your network address, used for one thing only · stopping the form being flooded. We use all of it to reply to you and to prepare a quote.

What the business must do

Using SKOPEIN does not move the owner's own duties onto us. If you are the one running the cameras, these stay yours:

• Put up the signs your local law asks for, where it asks for them, and tell your staff the cameras are watched.
• Point cameras only where you are allowed to point them. Never at a toilet, a changing room or a neighbour's property.
• Black out the parts of a picture that should not be in it, rather than leaving them in and hoping.
• Keep the list of people who receive alerts current, and take off anyone who has left.
• Ask questions of your cameras for the reasons the law allows · your property, your safety, your staff's safety. Not to follow one individual around.

Asking for a copy, or a deletion

Write to hello@skopein.app.

If it is your account: tell us what you want gone · one incident, one camera's history, or the whole account · and we will delete it. Ask for a copy and we will send you what we hold. Either way a person answers you, and you will not have to chase it.

If you were recorded and it is not your account: the footage belongs to the business that operates those cameras, so they are the ones who can release or delete it. Ask them. Write to us as well if you like · we will tell them you asked and help them do it properly · but the decision is theirs, not ours.

One honest limit: once a clip has passed its keep-time it is gone from the storage for good, so a request for a copy of something older than 90 days will usually find nothing left to send.

What this is not

SKOPEIN is software that watches and tells you. It is not a guard service, nobody is dispatched, and it does not stop anything happening. It can miss things: a camera only sees what it can see, and no system of this kind catches everything. It also depends on the business's own recorder, its computer and its internet · if any of those stops, the watching stops, and the only promise we make is that you are told when that happens.

The full version of that, with what we do and do not promise, is on the terms page.

When this page changes

The date under the heading at the top is the day this page last changed. If we change something that matters · a new place pictures go, a different keep-time · we say so in the console and by email to account holders, and we do not change it quietly.