Watchdog

Watchdog watches your own desk through your own Mac's camera. Apple's Vision framework handles face detection, Accelerate handles pixel-comparison motion detection, and both wait 3 seconds between triggers so one person walking past doesn't fill the folder. An Always-On mode shoots on a fixed interval instead, anywhere from 1 second to 1 hour. Captures are written to a folder you pick on this Mac and go nowhere else: the app ships with no network entitlement, so it cannot make an HTTP request even if it wanted to — no account, no analytics, no sync, nothing sent to the developer. Monitoring never starts on its own. You read a first-run recording notice, accept it, and switch monitoring on yourself; launching at login starts the app, not the camera. The menu bar icon is visible the entire time, and macOS lights its green camera indicator whenever the camera is open — Watchdog cannot suppress it and doesn't try. Free keeps captures for 3 days. Watchdog Pro is $3.99/month or $29.99/year, and the annual plan starts with a 7-day free trial.