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.
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.