Your data can't be breached where it isn't
A vendor cloud full of thousands of shops' cameras is a target. Your footage that never left your building isn't in that pile. The safest breach is the one that has nothing of yours.
ON YOUR PREMISES
Your footage never
leaves the building.
Most camera-AI companies stream your cameras to their cloud and keep the recordings. Vigil doesn't. It runs on a box in your shop, watches locally, and sends you one thing when it matters: a photo. Here is the whole data story — nothing hidden.
WHAT STAYS, WHAT LEAVES
Three lanes. That's the entire story.
Stays on your box · never uploaded
Live camera streams
Any recordings / archive
Person & vehicle detection
Evidence snapshots
Your bot token & settings
Detection runs on the machine in your building. Your cameras' video is processed locally and stored locally. There is no Vigil cloud recording your premises — if our servers vanished tomorrow, your guard would keep watching.
Leaves the box → to you · when there's an incident
The alert photo
To your own Telegram bot
When a person is confirmed after hours, the single alert image travels to your phone through your own Telegram bot — one you create, with a token only you hold. It's the delivery van for the alert, not a place your footage is stored. Turn the bot off and nothing leaves at all; the guard still detects and saves evidence on-site.
Optional · only if you switch on AI scene descriptions
One best frame → AI provider
Off by default-able
If you enable AI scene descriptions, one best frame of an incident is sent to the AI provider (Groq) to write the plain-English read. That's the only path that touches a third party — a single still, per incident, and only when you choose it. Leave it off and Vigil stays fully on-box with deterministic descriptions.
WHY IT MATTERS
On-prem isn't a feature. It's the whole point.
Works when the internet doesn't
Detection and evidence run locally, so a dropped line never blinds the guard. Alerts queue and send the moment you're back — and a camera going dark is itself an alert.
Simpler to keep lawful
Recordings that stay on your premises keep your CCTV footprint small and local — far easier to reason about under GDPR and comparable privacy law than video streamed to a third-party cloud.
Evidence clears itself out
Saved images auto-delete after your plan's window — Home after 5 days, Business after 15, Large sites after 30 — so your footprint stays small and lawful. You get a 2-day heads-up in the console and on Telegram, and can download anything you need to keep before it expires.
STRAIGHT COMMITMENTS
What we will and won't do with your cameras.
✓
We won't record your premises to a cloud. Video stays on the box in your building. There is no continuous upload of your feeds to us.
✓
You own the bot, you own the token. Alerts go through a Telegram bot you create. The token lives in your settings, masked in the UI, never in a config file we ship.
✓
The AI frame is your call. Only with AI scene descriptions on does a single still per incident reach Groq. Off = nothing leaves the box for AI.
✓
Pairing can't log in. The code that pairs a phone to alerts is deliberately different from your console PIN — a paired chat can never reach your console.
✕
We won't sell or mine your footage. There's no data business here. The product is the guard, not your video.
✕
We won't pretend the photo is magic. The alert image does travel to your phone. We say so plainly rather than claim "nothing ever leaves your site." Honesty is part of the security.
✓
You can take your evidence with you. Export any case as a photos-and-report package (.zip) to hand to police or your insurer. It stays on your box until you choose to download and share it — governed by the same CCTV rules as your cameras.
✓
Camera passwords are encrypted at rest on your box. This protects backups and copies of the database; a full compromise of the box itself can still read them.
LEGAL & GDPR
Is it legal to run?
Yes — Vigil is person-detection running on your own cameras, on your own premises. Because your recordings stay on-site, your data footprint is small and local, which keeps you on the right side of GDPR and similar privacy law more easily than a system that streams everything to a vendor cloud.
Your responsibilities
Under GDPR and similar laws, operating CCTV makes you the data controller: put up clear signage that CCTV is in use, keep footage only as long as you need it, and be ready to handle a subject-access request. If you switch on AI scene descriptions, factor in that a single frame per incident is processed by Groq. We help you get the signage and settings right on your setup call.
Where the line is
Vigil confirms a person, not who the person is — it isn't facial-recognition identity matching against a database. The face close-up is evidence for you and any police report, stored on your box. What you do with that evidence is governed by the same CCTV rules that already apply to your cameras.
When you need to act on an incident, you can export it — the annotated photos plus a plain-language report — as a single downloadable package. Nothing is sent anywhere automatically; the package leaves your premises only when you download it and pass it on.
Sleep on it — literally.
Two weeks free, no card, no contract. Your footage stays yours the whole time.