I happily use my Wyzecam v3 with SD cards so I I am not sending my video feeds to the cloud. However what gives me pause is how I am able to use the phone app to view my cameras when I am away from my home wifi. How is Wyze app able to ‘tunnel’ from the outside world to my internal wifi network? Or is it that my security camera feeds really are in the cloud?
With Wyze Cam, users can view camera videos using two methods: live streaming and recorded videos. Streaming is encrypted during transfer from device to phone. Camera videos are transferred under a secure channel from device to Wyze Cloud (ingestion) and from Wyze Cloud to phone (digestion).
Wyze employees do not have the ability to view a user’s camera’s live feed. This is because we use a P2P live streaming solution, which establishes a direct connection between the phone and the camera. While this is a technical solution to privacy, we also have a policy at Wyze prohibiting employees from viewing live streams.
Event videos, which are videos recorded when motion or sound is detected, are securely uploaded to the Wyze AWS server. From here, the video only would be accessed with permission from executive-level Wyze managers in extremely rare or severe cases, such as if Wyze were to be presented with a court subpoena. No other Wyze employees have access to these videos.
WildBill I very much appreciate the response and quote.
Where I am still unclear about is if the usage of the Wyze cloud can be completely severed. Per this earlier thread
It seems like
1.) using an SD card
2.) setting event recording to “Detects Motion”
3.) Turning off Notifications, turning off Alarm settings, turning off triggers
Should make my set-up completely local. That’s what I’m trying to verify.
Secondly, if that’s the case, that it is totally local…still curious as to how I can view my camera feed when I am not on my home network. It’s just not adding up for me
The only way to currently make the camera completely local is to install the webcam software. These cameras are pretty dependant on the cloud for receiving the settings, phoning home etc when the camera starts up.
Replying to my own post. I think this forum post below from “Loki” provides the answer to half my question. tldr; the “Detect Motion” and related features will invoke the 12 sec cloud.
But I still haven’t figured out how Wyze so smoothly is able to pierce my home firewall. Don’t get me wrong I am super happy with the app and hardware. I’m just thinking about all the trouble I had to go through back in the day to get my old BlueIris based system available externally. I had hours of messing with my router. And for Wyze it’s just …ding…and it works. Fantastic, but how?!
The 12 second event clips (stored in the cloud) are independent from SD card recording (in either event only or continuous mode).
If you turn off Detects Motion and Detects Sound in Event Recording and turn off Smoke Alarm and CO Alarm in Alarms Settings, then you will have no video sent to the cloud.
The above does not prevent you from using the Record Events Only mode for SD card recording found under Advanced Settings > Local Storage. In this case, the motion detected video will only be stored locally on the SD card. Every one-minute segment from mm:00 to mm:59 that contains any detected motion will be retained on the card, other 1 minute segments will be discarded.
Yes , my dual concerns with cloud are general privacy stuff, and then some vendor lock-in down the road, The eminently reasonable price point of Wyze wouldn’t make me cry too much if I had to junk the system if they mandated some subscription fee, but not my ideal spot to be in.
And I dunno, telemetry going to the cloud is one thing, video another. Though for the former, there is quite a bit of privacy being revealed as part of that meta data, when there motion detected, etc. Luckily the squirrels, cats, and racoons that make up most of my motion triggered events are random enough to mess with the best machine intelligence.
Wyze doesn’t pierce your firewall. Both the phone and camera make a connection to a server and establish a connection to each other. The camera makes a connection out through your router which isn’t blocked. The phone does not initiate a connection through the router to the camera. They both meet up on the internet with a secured connection.
Detect motion sends recordings to the cloud. Turn that off and in advanced settings select record to SD for events and the recordings are stored locally. It is nearly impossible to run the cameras without a connection to the internet. All configuration requires a connection and the cameras need to connect after a power outage. You can turn on RTSP with an alternative firmware and then connect to the camera without the Wyze app, but you lose a great deal of functionality.
Are there known technical differences between how Eufy and Wyze work for live streaming?
Every company talks a big game for their security implementation from a marketing perspective.
I get that some methods could be used to prevent from any cloud videos from being saved but is there some reason the same sort of thing that happened with Eufy for live streams couldn’t happen for Wyze?
Per the quote, I don’t think the same thing can happen at Wyze because there is no super-user like Eufy’s “Professor.” Wyze doesn’t have access to the streams.