Set up this camera
Any device with a camera and a browser — a phone in a window, a laptop, a USB webcam. Nothing to install, no account. Detection runs here; no video is ever uploaded.
Already have an outdoor IP camera? A shop, a workshop, anywhere with a camera on the street: it can feed the map from the machine you already have, with no video leaving your network. Add an IP camera →
SparrowMap does not keep your exact location. It is used only to work out which road your camera watches — the map stores just that road and a point blurred by about 60 m, never your address or your precise spot.
Already have a camera elsewhere? Scan its key with this device's camera app, or open the key file from a USB stick.
Watch the road
A 38 MB vehicle detector — the open-source model your phone uses to recognise vehicles on the device. It is the reason your video never leaves this phone: there is no server doing the looking, so there is nothing to upload.
- Nothing is installed. It is a file this web page loads, like an image. Closing the tab ends it.
- It comes from this site, not a third party.
- Once only. Your browser caches it, so every later start is instant.
- On mobile data it is a big download — Wi-Fi is kinder.
Leaving it running
- Keep it plugged in.
- Leave this window visible — browsers freeze hidden tabs, and a frozen tab sees nothing. It does not need to be focused.
- On battery it stops itself at 20% rather than killing the device.
- Wedge it against the glass; reflections are the usual reason a window camera sees nothing at night.
This camera's key
An account without an account.
Photograph this with another device to give it control of this camera. No sign-in, nothing to remember.
Rotating mints a new key and kills every copy of the old one, including any you printed or shared.
Take this camera off the map
It disappears from the public map and stops sending. Nothing is deleted: its past sightings of police vehicles stay, and you can put it back here with this key.
The secret sits after a # in the link, and
browsers never send that part to a server. Scanning a key
transmits nothing to us. We cannot recover it for you, because we do
not have it.