Who sees what, and when does it speak up? Privacy and alerts

Does it recognise faces? Who counts as "known" and "unknown"?

It recognises the people and vehicles it has been shown. Everyone else is unknown.

That is what makes "unknown person at the east gate" possible: residents, staff, and regular vehicles are known; the person trying three gate positions at 2 a.m. is not. Recognition is something you turn on and configure, not a default, and it works on your site rather than on the whole world.

An apartment community typically enrols residents' vehicles first, because a car that does not belong is the most common thing a gate camera sees.

Where does my footage go, and who can see it?

Your recorder keeps the footage. Only the moments the Awera box picks out are sent on, encrypted.

The Awera box watches the feeds on your premises and does not stream your recorder's continuous footage anywhere. What it sends is small: the clip of a moment that needs a look, encrypted, with faces blurred on the box first if you have asked for that. The alert, the clip, and the reports are kept for your retention period, encrypted at rest.

Who sees what is controlled by role. A clinic can let the night administrator see ward alerts without opening every camera to every staff member, and every access is written to an audit trail. You stay in control of your data, and it is designed with data-residency expectations in mind.

How long is anything kept?

Thirty days by default. You can make it longer or shorter.

Clips and events older than the retention period are removed. Some sites want longer for incident records; some want shorter for privacy. Either way it is set per customer, and the change is yours to make. Your own recorder's retention is separate and untouched; Awera does not alter how long your NVR keeps its recordings.

What should I tell residents, parents, staff, or guests?

The truth, briefly: the cameras are now watched, the footage stays on site, and a named person acts on each alert.

For an apartment community, that is a notice from the committee and a line in the house rules. For a childcare centre, it is a sentence in the parent handbook, with the reassurance that the point is faster response, not more recording.

We can provide wording you can adapt.

Can I blur people?

Yes, on the box itself, before anything is sent.

Faces can be blurred on your premises so that blurred faces never reach our servers at all. That is the setting most privacy-conscious sites choose for shared spaces like lobbies and gyms, and it is configured per customer.

Blurring does not stop the system from noticing a fall or a door left open. It only changes what a human sees in the clip.

How many false alerts will I get?

Fewer than you expect. We would rather not quote a number that depends on your site.

The whole system is built around staying quiet. Nothing reaches a person until it has been checked by three separate models, and that is where most false alerts are removed. What is left is tuned to your site during the trial, because a lobby with a cleaner at 5 a.m. every day should not ring at 5 a.m. every day.

Who gets alerted, and can it call someone if nobody responds?

You choose who gets which alert, and how. Urgent ones can call, and move on if nobody answers.

Routine alerts arrive in the app and as a phone notification. Urgent ones are a phone call, and if the first person does not respond, the call moves on to the next. A hotel might route a child near the pool after closing straight to a call, and a propped fire door to a message.

The point is that a critical alert never sits unread on a phone nobody is looking at. Today Awera alerts your own people; a monitoring desk where our team verifies alerts for you is not yet offered.

Can I set rules like "nobody in the pool after 10 p.m."?

Yes, in plain English. Awera calls these Automations, and they are most of what a site sets up after the first week.

• "Nobody in the pool after ten."
• "The fire lane stays clear."
• "The back door does not stay open longer than two minutes."
• "No vehicle in the loading bay overnight."

Each Automation is tested on your own footage before it goes live, so you can see what it would have flagged last week. You write the rule the way you would say it; Awera turns it into something the cameras check every second. The hotels page shows the kind of rules a property runs; every vertical page has its own.

Can it tell me when something that should have happened did not?

Yes. Awera calls these Routines: the alert that fires because nothing happened.

Most systems only notice things that happen. A Routine watches for something that should have happened by a certain time and did not: the guard round that was not done by 1 a.m., the gate that was not opened at 6, the ward check that was missed.

A warehouse night shift is the classic case.

What happens if the internet drops?

The box keeps watching. Everything syncs when the connection returns.

Everything it notices is stored locally, and when the connection comes back the clips and events are sent on in order, using a queue, so nothing is lost. What you will not get during the outage is the alert on your phone, because there is no way to reach it.

For a school with a flaky connection that means the record is complete even when the notification is late. If a camera itself goes dark, that is flagged as its own event.