Hey everyone,
We’ve built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.
We’ve put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.
The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We’ve also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.
We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think! If you’re interested in our efforts in general outside of DIY, our main website with our pre-built offering is here: click to see our website
From a quick glance at the repo?
The commits generally come hot and heavy. Going back to the earlier 2025 commits and the messages mostly look like what you would expect from folk raw dogging
main. Arrdalan in particular looks “real”-ish. Whereas jkaczman is already showing signs of the kinds of commit messages that claude et al generate, but those ARE based off certain style guides.Roll up to 2026 and I can see 11 commits on May 17 alone, they all look like claude messages, some are outright just arbitrarily changing magic hashes, and there are little to no comments.
Not gonna fully call this ai slop but, it is REAL flipping sus as it were. At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.
Those 11 commits were from a rebase-and-merge PR, which changes the date from the original commit. Notice how there’s a week gap between those and the prior commits on the main branch.
Fair enough. I’ll still say that is bad engineering but acknowledge that starts to get into the realm of taste.
Either way, in the past 24 days you have MR commits on 8 of those and April looks similar. The code is generally poorly documented and skimming the closed MRs, I am not seeing much discussion or review in any of them. So I stand by
At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.
Fair points. I appreciate the constructive criticism! Moving forward, we will improve on our documentation. In terms of review, we always review and test each other’s code (sometimes via other mode of communication), even if there weren’t any comments on the pull request.
Use at your own risk.
What an amazing conclusion, and the best part is, no matter what you’ve been waffling about before - it’s always right. Can we stop calling random things AI slop and telling to be careful bEcAuSe iTs Ai sLoP, and back to being cautious until something has been reviewed properly? Being careful with random stuff from GitHub you install and run in your private network?
Your whole comment may have been AI slop as well. “From a quick glance at the repo”, you should be careful! Thanks, Sherlock.
This intrigues me.
sus
This isn’t the first project like this, motionEye OS has been around for years.
Thanks for the reply! Based on what I know about motionEyeOS, I would say the projects have different goals.
From MotionEyeOS’s website: “Get instant email notifications when motion is detected.”, “Save recordings to cloud services, network drives, or local storage. Automatic backup and archiving options.”
We differ because we specifically made this to not compromise on functionality. We offer push notifications, easy private access via our mobile app, and the cloud relay cannot decrypt videos.(whereas it seems if you were to use the cloud with MotionEyeOS, they would not be encrypted).
While you could go local in MotionEyeOS to avoid that, it would be more inconvenient for most people, and we wanted something that could be a non-feature-compromising private replacement to modern cameras that’s simple to setup and easy to use.
I don’t mean the topic, I mean the project itself.
Just out of curiosity, why?
Common commercial cameras such as Ring/Blink/Nest are privacy-invasive and have lots of controversies, some examples being…
- Ring provided employees with unfettered access to customer footage
- ADT technician spies on customers for 4.5 years
- Eufy lied about local-only storage
- Amazon has provided Ring doorbell footage to law enforcement 11 times in 2022 without the user’s permission
- Ring Super Bowl ad normalizes a civilian surveillance network
We started on this project a long time ago to fix these issues by making it so that no cloud provider can see your home security videos. It’s completely end to end encrypted and private-by-default. It also is super easy to use and doesn’t compromise on features. As it’s a Raspberry Pi and it’s open source, it’s completely auditable and not a black box (unlike these common camera providers).That means you can verify that nothing bad is going on within your camera, instead of relying on a promise from someone.
No I meant why it was being questioned as “sus”. No agenda, just genuinely interested to hear opinions.
We started on this project a long time ago to fix these issues by making it so that no cloud provider can see your home security videos.
Just like standard ONVIF RTSP cams with a local NVR? It’s not like this is a new thing.
Bloef
Hi Bloef, this is meant to be a drop-in replacement to WiFi cameras (and therefore easy to use and easy to setup). A local NVR is great, and we definitely recommend it if you have the time to get one up and running.
Oddly ready with all the copy paste content.
Yep, 8minutes for the answer. A bit suss.
Not really. If I am posting something that I figure would generate discussion like this, I would have sources at the ready too. And though I am disabled now, I used to hash out 140+ wpm without errors, so this post would take maaaaaybe as much as 90 seconds, mostly formatting and a quick proofreading.
Not everything has to be ‘sus’, ‘dawg’.
GitHub content, profit website, automatic over air updates, content like “Earn $5 in Secluso credit for every qualifying referred pre-order.”
Just sounds like not actually secure marketing itself as super secure.
I could dig more, but i don’t care much.
Edit: also how super fast they commented on your comment with a copy paste answer. Or just a bot
Hi kibblebits,
I pulled the links from the cloud camera controversies page from our website. We already had them compiled there. I didn’t pre-write any answers. And you can see from our GitHub history that we’ve been around for over a year and a half, and that we’re real people. Not bots.
Our automatic updates rely on immutable releases, ensuring that we can’t pull them back to try to hide something malicious. Additionally, we have reproducible builds, proving that the binaries / deploy tool / OS were derived from our codebase.
Everything is self-host able, you do not need to pay us to get anything working. Our plug and play camera is completely optional, we’re using it to help support our open source efforts and provide something that benefits the community.
Your audience is people who don’t want a corporation involved in their cameras yet you’re trying to start a corporation who is involved in their cameras. You should prepare yourself for significant pushback.
You can’t expect them to give away free Pi and cameras, you jerk
Open source hardware companies sell hardware. Are you surprised?
You’re purposefully not paying attention because you want them to not be shady.
There certainly would be a market for a network camera ecosystem provided by a company that people can trust. I don’t think it has to be all or nothing, plenty of people really are in no position to self-host.
I’m not sure if there is anything out there that regular consumers currently could migrate to in case they want to get away from questionable companies. There are completely local systems (local recorder, no remote access), but those are lacking the home automation features / notifications, and well-respected brands that have been around (let’s say, Axis?) that are still closed source, not cross-platform and with pricing often not aimed at end customers.
I didn’t check out this project, so I’m certainly not saying this is it and there habe been various criticism of this particular project here, but I’d love if a decent project would emerge in the space.
Would you consider using a managed cloud solution + app if it’s open-source and properly end-to-end encrypted? How would a hypothetical company have to behave to be trustworthy, while still being allowed to profit? People here seem to like e. g. tuta.io for encrypted mail, I don’t see why a similar model could not work for network cameras.
These are genuine questions btw., I myself am really annoyed at the status quo with its data breaches, blatant lies to customers about encryption, and corporations willfully cooperating with fascist governments by proactively providing video data. I’m not even going to talk about AI training.
I would consider someone making a system that would run on a VPS and made zero external connections in regard to the camera software.
The problem is auto updates, telemetry, how they probably require a phone app when a web browser is 100% capable. Did I compile that phone app myself? No.
Most people don’t even know what to look for. Poor education. 🤷♂️ it’s too hard to help them. They should just get a local closed circuit system. It’s just about Amazon packages anyway
Hi kibblebits, please see below!
- We do not have telemetry.
- Our Android app is fully byte-for-byte reproducible. If you build it locally on your machine using our reproducible build script, it will match byte-for-byte the one in our GitHub releases. You can read more about reproducible builds here. In addition to our Android app, our deploy tools, OS image and binaries have these as well. This guarantees they were built from the source from our repositories.
- Our relay is self hostable on any VPS you like.
We’d be happy to add an option to disable auto update in our next release.
If you have any other ideas for features we can add or changes we should make, please let us know.
Agreed, it’s all very commercial. It’s nice that there’s a way to run it self hosted but in that case I prefer something like LightNVR.
I think they’re just a privacy-focused startup that just wants to make a living off their work
And that makes them a corporation that cannot be trusted. Because if they have any data or access in any fashion… it’s not actually private.
And from what I can see it’s two people? Who are they. I want to know where they live and how they vote. It’s a lot of faith in the very very unknown. How will they handle government data requests?
You can already run DietPi and cam software for a very secure camera setup on your own for like $40 per camera (I dunno about price hikes lately)
Matrix. Bitwarden. Nextcloud. There are many examples of open-source, self-hosted applications that have for-profit companies that offer to host them for you as a service. Now if you use one of those Nextcloud providers to store your notes, can that providers read all your data? Of course. But for people who don’t want to self-host, it’s often a more trusted option than Google.
You’re not listening.
yeah, the 2 person startup big corporation. you lost your mind. if you want to make hardware, you can’t do it without a business, you’ll need to be handling money in quantities. not all businesses are bad.
Additional comment,
A computer that has its own Linux distro that does work but it clearly a demo.
Been taking $99 preorders for… two years?
Secluso will be taking “preorders” this month. Wanna bet how many years before it launches its hardware?
You don’t have to pre-order, just wait until it’s released and buy it then. And in this case you can get a raspi and test the product for yourself, so why spread FUD?
You’re not listening
this reply adds nothing. Please explain your position
Yuuup some red flags going on. “Look at all these possible controversies and doubts you may have! We already have the answers because we really want you to use this product!”
At least with other cameras they may be stealing my data and selling it but at least I can join a class action lawsuit and get some free credit monitoring out of it.
Right, I was just thinking about that. These two people, allegedly, are going to sell hardware and software and cloud storage in an industry that could very easily sue them… ehhhhhh. It doesn’t seem too thought out.
Typically these things try to make a huge separation between the code and any actual hardware or cloud service etc.
“We are super not looking at the videos you upload to our private cloud that is definitely not audited”
Exited to see more! Keep up the good work!
The iOS app is not available in my country in Europe.
Is there a way to integrate this into Home Assistant as well?
We’re exploring Home Assistant integrations for the next update.
Unfortunately, iOS does not allow us to publish in 20ish countries, which are all Europe-based. This is due to certain legislation.
What exactly is preventing you from publishing the App in Europe? There‘s all kinds of similar apps on the Appstore already.
Secluso is developed by Secluso, Inc. and co-founded by:
Ardalan Amiri Sani, a UC Irvine professor with expertise in computer security and privacy
John Kaczman, an open source and privacy enthusiast with experience in automation, systems, and AI.
~70% Rust. Are they all Rust programmers? How much of this app was generated through LLMs?
The only thing AI is used on in this project is strictly for user interface work (our website, the front-end for the mobile app, the front-end for the deploy tool). We carefully vet anything like that.
I think you may have misinterpreted my “automations, systems, and AI” (you put it in bold), that is intended to show my experience in machine learning (example: I spent 4 months in a lab helping improve the accuracy of wearable ECG abnormality detection). I do not rely on LLMs.
Great to see.
The ubiquiti bell is the best but it is american and overpriced. I want something that can record, two way talk and display a message. The parcel camera is a bonus. It also needs to be able to be silenced at set times.
okay this is actually a cool project to work on
Finally, open source surveillance
This one won’t automatically be a spy for any agency that asks tho, so that’s cool…
Surveilance cameras aren’t necessarily a bad thing
Sousveillance
What temp ranges are these good for? Can it run off solar+battery?
How are you protecting against supply chain attacks?
Hi Brkdncr, thanks for the question!
We honestly do not have a concrete answer for the temp ranges. We’ve done some testing and made sure they stay under 150F in the 3D case shown in the picture.
We do not currently directly support solar/battery usage. You can probably DIY something together though!
For Software: We’ve started to thoroughly go through our dependencies by using the Cargo Vet tool, in addition to looking for unmaintained dependencies, dependencies that we can replace with a few lines of code, etc.
For Hardware: We’re using trusted hardware providers like Raspberry Pi to try to mitigate this.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Cargo is a red flag. It doesn’t verify any cryptographic signatures of what it downloads, unlike apt and maven.
To help mitigate that, we use Cargo.lock files to pin all of our dependencies checksums (integrity validation) until we want to upgrade. When we upgrade, we’re working on having Cargo Vet to manually go through (in addition to trusted third party auditors) to ensure the changed code isn’t malicious.
Where can I read more about cargo vet and these third party auditors?
https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/index.html
2.4 “Importing Audits” goes into these third party auditors (the registry).
The poster’s account is under 1 day old. There are multiple brand new accounts interacting with this post, too.
And one of them is replying with positive sentiment.
But the one calling it sus is also 5 days old, and making good points.
🤔
I guess its just us in here then, among these AI bots.
I’ll wait.
I’ve been looking for something like this. To be more accurate, I’ve been looking for something that works as a doorbell/intercom, that doesn’t rely on big tech in some way or other. But this seems like a promising start.
I ended up going with Unifi (G4 Pro Doorbell) after my test-run with Reolink went… poorly. It’s technically still ‘big tech’ but all the parts are on my property and my control, and (at least for the doorbell, that’s all I’ve got so far) it works nearly-perfectly with HA (I can’t get custom screen messages to stick when assigned through HA).
Why did you opt for pro vs nonpro out of curiosity?
It’s been a bit but I do remember I wanted the bigger screen, the fingerprint and nfc readers are nice to integrate ‘eventually’, and I think it was only an extra like $75? Oh, and the secondary package cam, that was the main factor tbh.
I wanted to get the poe version + their chime, but I got vetoed since ‘we already have a mechanic chime’ and I don’t have PoE setup in the house. But my pitch for the pro model was successful and an easy sell.
The only thing worse than your partner vetoing you is when they’re right.
Thank you for the response, very informative!
Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.
I bought a unit + 4tb surveillance drive, to replace a (what we thought was a) dying nest hardwired gen2 doorbell. I was excited - pulled it out of the box, ‘oh, it has an AC brick too! I can set it up and make sure it works before we install it’
Prepped the camera, prepped the nas to ingest the feed and drives, setup the non-proprietary stream (the acronym/letters escape me), all on the AC plug… And the feed, from the cam to the reolink app absolutely ground to a halt. I’m talking like, after 5 minutes of uptime, the feed was 60+ seconds behind. Absolutely wild. I restarted the app, phone, doorbell, no fix. I turned off the open-source (?) feed, going with only reolink’s proprietary stream. Better, but after 10 minutes it was still 30+ seconds behind. Reset the doorbell, set it up again, no change…
So either I got a defective/malfunctioning doorbell, a bad AC plug (but wouldn’t it just die if it was pulling too much power…?), the AC plug isn’t rated for anything more than very intital setup (I saw nothing about that in the instructions, and why would you do that…) or that is ‘working as intended’ which, why even bother if that is true.
B&H accepted both doorbell and drive, opened, no questions asked. Was very excited and it genuinely ruined my day. :(
Sorry to hear your bad experience. Was the acronym you were looking for ONVIF?
Yeah, that’s it!
I thought ONVIF is just the control, not the stream. the stream is normally RTSP
Maybe - I have two decades in tech but camera stuff is basically still new to me. I just know that the ootb system for reolink doesn’t play nice (or at all) with any systems that are foss/not reolink, so I had to toggle the setting for it to cooperate.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PoE Power over Ethernet Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #312 for this comm, first seen 24th May 2026, 22:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
These comments are why privacy and open-source will always be behind. These people are just trying to make a living off making privacy-focused products. And all the comments are like “They’re a for-profit company? They had marketing material prepped to reply to people’s comments?!”. The code is open-source, self-hostable, built using commodity hardware (raspi), and they’re just trying to make it sustainable by providing an optional paid service. This is not the enemy.
I see this with open source hardware a lot.
People want free hardware. That doesn’t work. Give your money to companies like this.
Besides, it’s just a good way of doing it. For the people that want to DIY: here’s the instructions. For people that just want the thing: here’s the payment instructions.
Sometimes I just want the thing.
No good deed goes unpunished. The sense of self entitlement some people display is staggering. FOSS project? Well, you should have done x y or z.
Also, I gave you $3 via Ko-fi, so you need to provide customer support in perpetuity and come to my house and install it. And heaven forbid you try to recoup costs!
Projects don’t just die out - a lot of them are killed (one way or another). For example, I had a fully specced out FPGA design that would capture the signal from Wii GPU and do internal upscaled resolution (think: like what dolphin emulator does but with actual hardware) not just post process sharpening. Total cost under $100 and some know how.
The amount of flack I copped for it made me shut down the github and work on it for myself. Once it’s perfected, I may post about it again but I sure as shit am not compelled to deal with the fucking peanut gallery anymore.
Agreed, however the number of positive comments from one-day old accounts is suspect for me.
This is a security product where trust is paramount, so I get a bit itchy about anything like that, but I could be overreacting.
I can’t speak to the account thing, I checked the guy you replied to and it seems like his is 3 months old, not yesterday.
I wanted to mention that we plan to get a third-party security audit by a reputable firm sometime this summer.
Yea I edited that part because Lemmy was not showing me the right info, but there are more below, which is… Odd.
In any event, great to hear about an SA, and I have starred the project to check it out.
I used to think Reddit users were too negative. Then I joined Lemmy.
Loud people are negative. Doesn’t matter the website.
Yeah, free, open source is fun, but we should also just support companies that have good ethics and want to make enough money to earn a living and keep making good products that respect people.
I want utopian space communism, but I’m not going to hold out for only that ideal when I can support alternatives that are better than the current system.
You do you, but I’m holding out for it… and only in fully automated, luxury, gay form.
You have my blessing.
Yeah supporting companies which makes privacy focused products, will create incentives for selling them to people which want them not just gaining additional profits from selling your data or showing you with ads
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free. What a blessed utopia that must be.
A “privacy product” inherently involves a lot of trust. When the creators are academics with little to no professional footprint, you need to assess things based on what information they do provide you. Whether that be code (yay open source) or customer interactions (forum posts).
I know we all yearn for the days of “Use Google. Their motto is ‘do no evil’ so you know they are our friends!”. But… that was a much stupider time.
Like, even if you suckle at the teat of Saint Capitalism, you should at least want a good product. And… this looks like enthusiast code with minimal maintainability but a heavy emphasis on marketing.
