A common question we get — let’s address it directly.
Short answer
No, not by default. Live video between your camera phone and viewer phone is peer-to-peer. It travels directly between your two devices over the internet, not through our servers.
The longer story
There are three things to separate:
1. Live viewing (Camera ↔ Viewer)
WebRTC — direct peer-to-peer. The connection negotiation goes through a small signaling server (just to help your two devices find each other), but the actual video stream doesn’t. We can’t see it even if we wanted to. (Why P2P)
2. Recording
Recordings are stored on the camera phone itself. Not uploaded. If you delete the Oriel app on the camera phone, the recordings go with it.
3. Cloud storage (optional, paid feature)
If you opt into cloud storage, only events (motion clips with thumbnails) are uploaded to our cloud (Cloudflare R2 in the EU). Continuous recording is never uploaded — only the short event clips. You can opt out anytime; existing cloud clips can be deleted from the app.
What about TURN relay?
In about 5–10% of network setups (strict carrier-grade NAT, some corporate firewalls), peer-to-peer doesn’t work and the stream falls back to a TURN relay. We use Cloudflare’s TURN service. The relay forwards encrypted bytes — we can’t decrypt them, but we wanted to be transparent that the path exists.
What we collect
- Account email, login state
- App crash reports (anonymized)
- Aggregate Cloudflare Web Analytics on oriel.camera (no cookies)
That’s it. Full details in the privacy policy.
Why we built it this way
The whole point of Oriel is that your camera is your camera. When we put cloud video at the center, we’d be one breach away from your living room being on the news. P2P-by-default is more work for us (NAT traversal is hard) but it’s the only design that’s honest with the promise.
— Oriel team