Watchdog Privacy Policy

The short version

Watchdog uses your Mac's camera to detect motion or faces and saves what it sees to your own Mac. Those captures never leave your device. Watchdog has no account system, no analytics, and no servers — it ships without the macOS entitlement that would let it make a network request at all, so transmitting your captures is not something it is configured to do and not something it can do.

Who we are

Watchdog is published by Mark Studios, LLC ("we", "our", "us"), a Florida limited liability company, under its NoSleepLab studio brand. For anything in this policy, including data-protection requests, contact hello@markstudios.com. Our postal address is available on request.

What Watchdog captures

When you turn monitoring on, Watchdog records:

• Still images (JPEG) from the camera you selected, taken when a detection fires or on a fixed interval in Always-On mode.
• Short video clips (H.264, about five seconds, no audio) on each detection — only if you have a Watchdog Pro subscription and have switched video recording on. Watchdog never records audio.
• Capture metadata: the date and time, which detection type fired (face, motion, or interval), a confidence value, and the file paths of the image and clip.

These images and clips will contain the faces of whoever is in front of the Mac. That is the purpose of the app, and it is why the rest of this policy exists.

Where it is stored

Everything is written to the capture folder on your Mac — by default a folder inside Watchdog's own sandbox container, or a folder you choose yourself in Preferences. Watchdog reads and writes only that folder and files you explicitly pick, because macOS App Sandbox restricts it to exactly that. Captures are stored unencrypted, so they are protected by your Mac's own protections — your account password and FileVault, if you have it enabled. Anyone with access to your unlocked Mac can open them.

What leaves your Mac

Nothing that Watchdog captures. To be specific about the boundaries:

• No image, clip, or piece of capture metadata is sent to us or to any third party.
• There is no account, no login, no sync, no cloud backup, no crash reporter, and no analytics or advertising SDK of any kind.
• Watchdog is built without the com.apple.security.network.client entitlement. macOS blocks outbound connections from the app as a result.
• Subscription purchases are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. We never see your payment details. Apple tells the app only whether an active subscription exists. Apple's handling of that transaction is covered by Apple's privacy policy, not this one.
• If you export a PDF report or move a capture yourself, you are moving that data deliberately, and where it goes afterwards is up to you.

How long captures are kept

Free: captures older than three days are permanently deleted — the metadata record and the underlying image and video files. Watchdog Pro: captures are kept until you delete them.

Deletion runs when the app launches, once an hour while it is running, and after each new capture. If Watchdog is not running, nothing is deleted until you next open it.

If a Pro subscription lapses, the three-day limit applies again. The first time Watchdog runs after that, captures older than three days are deleted permanently and cannot be recovered. Export anything you want to keep before letting a subscription end.

Copies that live outside the capture folder

Two features make copies that the retention rules above do not govern, and you should know where they are:

• Notification thumbnails. To show a preview in a macOS notification, Watchdog copies the image into a temporary folder inside its container. These copies are deleted when Watchdog quits and again when it next launches, so they survive at most one session.
• PDF reports. A report you export contains capture images and is written wherever you saved it. It is an ordinary file that belongs to you; Watchdog never deletes it, and the three-day rule does not reach it.

Deleting your data

You are always in control of this:

• Delete an individual capture from the capture browser.
• Use Delete All Captures in Preferences → Storage to erase every image and clip at once.
• Open the capture folder in Finder and delete files directly.
• Dragging Watchdog to the Trash removes the app and its container, including the default capture folder. If you chose a custom folder outside the container, delete that folder yourself.

Because we never receive any of it, there is nothing for us to delete on your behalf and no request you need to send us.

Camera access and the recording indicator

macOS asks for your permission before Watchdog can use the camera, and you can revoke it at any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Camera. Whenever the camera is active, macOS shows a green indicator light next to the menu bar. That indicator is drawn by the operating system: Watchdog cannot hide, dim, or fake it, and does not try to. Watchdog's own menu bar icon is also visible the entire time it is running. Monitoring never starts by itself — you switch it on, and only after accepting a notice explaining what gets recorded.

Recording other people is your responsibility

Watchdog photographs whoever walks up to your Mac. Those people are not the person who bought the app and cannot agree on your behalf. Laws on recording other people vary widely by country, state, and setting, and workplaces, shared houses, and rented rooms often have stricter rules. You are responsible for complying with the law where you are and for informing people who may be recorded. Do not use Watchdog to monitor people covertly or on devices that are not yours.

Diagnostic logs

Watchdog writes occasional diagnostic messages to the macOS unified log — the same system log every app uses. File paths in those messages are marked private, so macOS redacts them by default. These logs stay on your Mac and are never collected by us.

Children

Watchdog is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children — we do not collect information from anyone. If you are a parent who believes a child has used Watchdog to record others, the captures are on that Mac and can be deleted as described above.

Your rights under GDPR and similar laws

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, data-protection law gives you rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection over personal data a controller holds about you. We hold none: Watchdog transmits nothing to us, so there is no record on our side to access, correct, or erase. Data created by the app stays on your own device under your own control. If you believe we hold personal data about you, write to hello@markstudios.com and we will respond. You also have the right to complain to your local supervisory authority.

California residents

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months. We collect no personal information from Watchdog users, so there are no categories of personal information to disclose and no data to delete on request. California residents retain their rights under the CCPA/CPRA and will never be discriminated against for exercising them.

This website

This policy covers the Watchdog application. Visiting nosleeplab.com is separate: the site is hosted by Vercel, which processes standard server request logs (including IP addresses) to serve pages and protect against abuse. The site does not set advertising cookies and does not track you across other websites.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of the page. If a future version of Watchdog ever collects or transmits data, we will say so here and in the App Store privacy label before that version ships — not afterwards.

Contact

Mark Studios, LLC — hello@markstudios.com