We don't collect what we don't need.

cloudHWS is built around a simple principle: your photos and personal data live on hardware you own — not on our servers. This policy explains what little data we do collect, where it goes, and what your rights are.

What we collect

Through this website (cloudhws.com):

• Email address — only if you join the waitlist. Stored by our form provider (Formspree).
• Standard server logs from our hosting provider (Vercel): IP address, browser type, pages visited. Used for security and basic traffic analysis.

When you purchase cloudHWS:

• Name, email, and billing country — collected by Stripe at checkout and shared with us. Used to issue your license, send the receipt, and comply with tax obligations.
• Card details are handled entirely by Stripe. We never see your card number.
• Order & license records — your purchase, license key, and refund status. Retained for 7 years to meet tax and accounting requirements.

When you activate cloudHWS on your hardware:

• License key + Pi serial number — sent to our server once, the first time you activate, so we can bind the license to your specific device. After that initial check, your Pi runs fully offline. We do not phone home for ongoing validation.

Through the cloudHWS app:

• Crash logs, stored locally on your device. We do not transmit them to any server.
• Authentication credentials for your home server, stored locally on your device.

What we don't collect

• Your photos. They never touch our infrastructure. The cloudHWS app sends photos directly from your phone to your own home server over your local network.
• Your photo metadata. Same.
• Usage analytics from the app. We don't track how you use the app.
• Face recognition data, AI training data, or any biometric information. We never run face recognition or any AI inference on your photos. Period.

Where your data lives

The cloudHWS server software, when installed on your hardware (Raspberry Pi or other Linux device), stores all photos, metadata, and account information on the storage drive(s) connected to that device. We have no remote access to that data.

Remote access

When you're away from home WiFi, the cloudHWS app connects to your Pi through an encrypted relay we operate. This lets you view and back up photos from anywhere, without you having to expose your home network to the public internet.

How it works:

• Encrypted in the relay. The connection between your phone and your Pi is encrypted as it passes through the relay we operate. Your photos and library live only on your own device — we never store them on the relay.
• What the relay sees. The relay can see connection metadata: which Pi a phone is connecting to, when, and approximate traffic volume. We use this only for routing the connection and detecting abuse — not for analytics or profiling — and we don't store or inspect your photos or library content.
• No content storage. No photos, no file data, and no library metadata are stored on the relay. The relay is a forwarding service, not a cache. Once a connection ends, nothing of your traffic remains on our infrastructure.
• You control it. Remote access can be disabled in the app settings at any time. When disabled, the app talks to your Pi only over your local home network.

The relay exists for one purpose: forwarding the encrypted connection between your phone and your own Pi. It is not used to route any other traffic, inject ads, intercept data from other apps, or any commercial VPN-like function.

Place names on your photos

When the app shows where a photo was taken (for example "Westdale, Hamilton"), it asks your phone's built-in map service to turn the photo's GPS coordinates into a place name — Apple's geocoder on iPhone, Google's on Android. This is the same service your phone's own Photos app uses.

• Only coordinates are sent — a pair of latitude/longitude numbers. The photo itself, its contents, and the rest of its metadata never leave your device for this.
• It goes to your phone's OS, not us. cloudHWS never receives these lookups — they're handled by Apple or Google under their own privacy policies.
• Looked up once, then cached. Each place is resolved a single time and stored on your device, so the same location isn't sent again.

Third parties

This website and our purchase flow use:

• Formspree for waitlist signups (handles your email)
• Vercel for hosting (handles standard web traffic data)
• Stripe for payment processing (handles card data, name, email, billing country)
• Resend for transactional emails — your receipt and license key delivery
• Outbound links to amazon.com for hardware suggestions. Once you click through, Amazon's privacy policy applies.

Each of these processors has their own privacy policy. The cloudHWS app itself does not use any third-party SDKs for analytics, advertising, or data collection.

Data retention

• Waitlist emails — kept until you ask us to remove yours, or until the waitlist is retired post-launch.
• Order & license records — kept for 7 years for tax and accounting compliance.
• Activation records (license key + Pi serial number binding) — kept for the lifetime of the license, so you can re-activate if you reinstall.

Your rights

• Email us to delete your waitlist signup
• Request access to or deletion of your purchase data (subject to legal retention requirements above)
• Delete your photos at any time by removing them from your home server
• Stop using the app at any time

Children

cloudHWS is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

Changes to this policy

We'll post any updates here with a new "Last updated" date. Significant changes will be communicated through the app or by email if you've signed up.

Contact

Questions about this policy? contact@cloudhws.com