Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 July 2026.

What changed on 26 July 2026: the AI model that reads your garage-door snapshot now runs on our own hardware in the United Arab Emirates, reached through a server hosted for us by Contabo GmbH in Germany, with Amazon Bedrock (AWS, United States) as the automatic fallback. So the snapshot travels United States → Germany → United Arab Emirates to be read, and is stored on neither of those machines. The snapshot itself is still stored in the United States, with the same retention as before. See §4, Where your snapshot is analysed and §11. (An earlier version of this page published today described the analysis as happening on our own server in Germany; that was incorrect — Germany is the connection's entry point, not where the model runs.)

This Privacy Policy explains how Garage Check ("we", "us", "our") collects, uses, and shares information when you use the Garage Check mobile application and related services (the "Service"). Garage Check is operated by Erbacci LLC ("Erbacci"), the controller of personal data described below. Contact: info@erbacciltd.com.

1. What Garage Check does

Garage Check answers one nightly question: "did I leave the garage open?" At a local time you choose (23:00 by default), it looks at the most recent image from a Ring outdoor camera you own that can see your garage door, has a vision model read the state of the door (open, partially open, closed, not visible, or unknown), and sends you one check result, delivered by email and, where enabled, push notification. A one-tap "Check now" runs the same check on demand. Garage Check is a convenience reminder, not a security or safety system — not a substitute for closing and locking your garage. It looks at the garage door only; it does not identify people and it does not read license plates.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Information you provide

• Account identifiers from Ring. When you link your Ring account, we receive your Ring account ID and the email address associated with your Ring account.
• Garage configuration. A name for each garage (e.g. "Home"), the Ring outdoor camera you select for it, its time zone, and your chosen nightly check time.
• Preferences. Whether the nightly check is enabled, whether to also send the reassuring "garage closed" result, and any snooze you set.

2.2 Information we receive from Ring

• One snapshot image per check. For each nightly or manual check, we retrieve a single still frame from the outdoor camera you selected — the freshest frame available at check time. If the camera has no recent footage, we may briefly open a short server-side live session (about 8 seconds) solely to prompt the camera to record a fresh frame — see §3. We do not stream, watch, or store continuous video.
• Device metadata from Ring — camera identifiers and names, so you can pick the camera that sees your garage.
• Subscription webhooks from Ring, so we know your subscription state.

2.3 Information we generate

• Door-state classifications — the structured JSON output of the vision model: whether the door is visible, its state (open / partially open / closed / not visible / unknown), whether a vehicle is visible (a yes/no flag only — never a plate or a make/model), whether it is night, and a confidence score.
• Check records — when each check ran, what triggered it (scheduled or manual), its outcome, and how fresh the judged frame was.
• Check snapshots — the still frame judged for a check, together with a SHA-256 hash of the exact image bytes so the snapshot can be shown to be untampered.
• Notification records — which notifications we attempted (email and push), to which addresses or devices, and the outcome. Check-result notifications are delivered by email (via Resend, our email delivery subprocessor) to the email address on your Ring account, and additionally by push notification when a mobile device is registered; the result email contains the door-state result and a time-limited link (valid up to 24 hours) to the snapshot image.
• Diagnostic logs — error traces and performance metrics, scoped to internal use.

2.4 Information from your device

• Push notification tokens (APNs / FCM) so we can additionally deliver check results by push notification when you register a mobile device (results are always delivered by email).
• Device metadata — OS version, app version, locale — used for compatibility and analytics.
• Stable per-install device identifier generated by the app on first launch. Not linked to any advertising identifier.

We do not collect: faces, faceprints, or other biometric identifiers; license plate numbers; audio; location data outside the camera's fixed outdoor view; contact list, calendar, or other unrelated device data.

3. The camera "wake" live session

Ring cameras only record when something wakes them. If, at check time, your camera has no sufficiently recent footage, Garage Check may open a short server-side live (RTSP) session of roughly 8 seconds for the sole purpose of prompting the camera to record, so a fresh frame exists to judge. Media resulting from a wake session is machine-processed only — it is never viewed by a human, and only the single still frame used for the check is stored. If waking the camera fails, we fall back to the newest available older frame, and the notification tells you the image is from an earlier time.

4. Where your snapshot is analysed

Answering "is the door open?" means having an AI vision model look at the snapshot. That reading happens on hardware we own and run ourselves in the United Arab Emirates, and the connection to it passes through a hosting provider in Germany on the way. Garage Check is offered only in the United States, so your image leaves the US to be read, and we would rather set out the whole path plainly here than bury it:

• The path your snapshot takes. From AWS in the United States, over an encrypted connection, to vision.erbacciltd.com — a server hosted for us by Contabo GmbH in Karlsruhe, Germany (European Union) — and from there onward to our own machine in the United Arab Emirates, which is where the model actually reads the image. In short: United States → Germany → United Arab Emirates.
• What the German server does, and why we name Contabo. That machine is the public front door of our analysis service. It is a reverse proxy — it holds no model and does no analysis — but it is the point at which the encrypted connection is unwrapped before the request is passed on. That means your snapshot passes through infrastructure operated by Contabo GmbH in unencrypted form while in transit. We keep no copy of it there — the request is forwarded on. That machine is Contabo's infrastructure rather than ours, though, so what its own systems may record while a request passes through is not something we can independently attest, and we do not claim otherwise. That is precisely why we name Contabo as a sub-processor in §6 rather than describe the whole chain as "our own infrastructure". No AI company is involved in this step.
• What the machine in the UAE does. It is our own hardware, running our own software and our own copy of the model — not a third party's AI service. The image is decoded and resized in that machine's memory, passed to the model running on the same machine, and discarded when the request finishes. It is not written to disk on that machine, and no copy of it remains there. Its log records only the outcome — the door state, a confidence score, how long it took, the model name, and a request id — never the image or any part of it.
• How it is protected on the way. The connection from AWS to the front door in Germany is encrypted (HTTPS/TLS) and a secret access token is required; a request that does not present that token is refused. At that front door the encryption is terminated, which is why the snapshot passes through Contabo's infrastructure in readable form. The onward hop from Germany to our own machine runs over a link we operate; we are not making a claim here about the protection applied to that second hop.
• The model. An open-weights vision model (qwen3.5 9B, Q8) that we run ourselves on our own GPU. It is used for inference only: your snapshots are not used to train, fine-tune, or improve it, or any other model.
• If our own server cannot answer. If it is unreachable, too slow, or returns something unusable, the check automatically falls back to Amazon Bedrock in AWS region us-east-1 (N. Virginia, United States), running Anthropic's Claude (Haiku 4.5, with a second look from Sonnet 4.5 on anything that is not a confident "closed"). On that path your image does not leave the United States. Repeated failures take our own server out of the path entirely until it recovers. A check is never dropped because our server is down.
• Where the snapshot is stored — this has not changed. The snapshot file itself is still stored in Amazon S3, AWS region us-east-1 (N. Virginia, United States), with the same retention as before (§7). Storage stays in the United States; only the reading of the image leaves it.

Everything else — your account, your garage settings, your check history, the emails and push notifications — stays in the United States. See §11 for the transfer in plain terms.

5. How we use information

• Run your nightly and on-demand garage checks and read the door state from the snapshot.
• Send you one check result per check, delivered by email (via Resend, our email delivery subprocessor) to the email address on your Ring account and additionally by push notification when a mobile device is registered. The result email contains the door-state result and a time-limited link (valid up to 24 hours) to the snapshot image. The lower-priority "all clear" result can be turned off.
• Send the same check result to one additional email address of your choosing — a partner or a house-sitter — if you add one. We email a confirmation code to that address first and send nothing there unless the person who reads it enters the code; you can remove the address at any time, which stops delivery immediately. The two copies are sent separately, so neither recipient sees the other's address.
• Send you occasional service messages about your own account, by email to the address on your Ring account. These are sent only when the specific event occurs, and are limited to: a notice that a camera was removed from your Ring account and the garage that used it has stopped being checked; a notice that we can no longer reach your Ring account and you need to re-add Garage Check in the Ring app; a notice that your introductory period is ending; and, only if you ask for it by pressing the button, an email containing the App Store and Google Play links to the mobile app. We do not send marketing, promotional or newsletter email, and we do not use Ring data for marketing.
• Maintain your account, including subscription state.
• Improve the Service by analysing aggregate accuracy metrics. Snapshots and other Ring user data are not used to train our models or any third party's models.
• Comply with legal obligations and respond to lawful requests.

The vision model is instructed to read the state of the garage door only — this is true of both models described in §4, the one we run ourselves and the Amazon Bedrock fallback. Neither identifies, recognises, describes, or enrolls any person; neither reads license plates (vehicle presence is reported as a simple yes/no); and we operate no integrations that share data with law enforcement.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not "share" personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising as defined under CCPA/CPRA.

6. How we share information

• Amazon Web Services — infrastructure provider (storage of your snapshots, check history, and account data; compute), region us-east-1 (N. Virginia, USA). AWS also runs the fallback vision model described in §4.
• Contabo GmbH (Karlsruhe, Germany) — the hosting provider for the server that is the public entry point to our analysis service (§4). Because the encrypted connection is unwrapped on that machine before the request continues to our own hardware in the United Arab Emirates, your snapshot passes through infrastructure Contabo operates in unencrypted form while in transit. We keep no copy of it there, and Contabo does not perform the analysis and holds no model. Because that machine is Contabo's infrastructure rather than ours, we do not claim to have audited what its own systems record while a request passes through — which is why it is listed here as a sub-processor.
• No other company sees the image at the analysis step itself. The model that reads your snapshot runs on hardware we own and operate in the United Arab Emirates (§4). Contabo is named above because your image passes through its infrastructure on the way, not because it analyses anything.
• Anthropic, via the Amazon Bedrock service, for vision model inference on the fallback path only (§4). Snapshots are not retained by the model provider beyond the inference call and are not used for model training.
• Apple and Google, for push notification delivery.
• Resend — our email delivery subprocessor, for delivery of sign-in one-time codes, of check-result notification emails, of the account service messages described in §3, and of the confirmation code for an additional notification address — sent to the email address on your Ring account, and, where you have added and confirmed one, to that additional address. Resend receives the recipient's email address and the message content — which, for a check result, includes the door-state result and a time-limited link (valid up to 24 hours) to the snapshot image; it does not receive Ring camera media files or account tokens.
• Ring (Amazon), for account linking, camera media retrieval, and subscription webhooks.
• Law enforcement or regulators, only where required by valid legal process. Garage Check operates no law-enforcement integrations and no evidence-sharing programs.

7. Retention

Deletion cascades: removing a garage or camera deletes its check history and snapshot images. Unlinking the Ring integration deletes our stored Ring tokens and Ring account binding, all garages, and all check history and snapshot images, but retains a minimal account record (email, subscription state, disclaimer acceptance) so a future re-link works, and retains push-device registrations until the account itself is deleted. Deleting your account in-app erases everything, including that minimal record and push tokens. For full erasure, delete your account in-app or email info@erbacciltd.com.

8. Your rights

You may have the right to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict processing of your personal information. Exercise these rights from inside the app (the Account tab → Delete account) or by emailing info@erbacciltd.com. We respond within 30 days. We do not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

If you are a California resident, you have rights under the CCPA/CPRA including the right to know, delete, correct, and opt out of "sale" or "sharing" (we do neither).

9. Security

• Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest (AWS managed encryption).
• The snapshot travels to our analysis service (§4) over an encrypted HTTPS connection and only with a secret access token; a request without that token is refused. The encrypted connection is unwrapped at the front-door server in Germany hosted by Contabo, and the request is then carried on to our own machine in the United Arab Emirates, which performs the reading.
• HMAC signature verification on all incoming webhooks.
• Short-lived JWT session tokens stored in iOS Keychain / Android Keystore.
• Least-privilege IAM policies on every backend component.

10. Children

The Service is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe we have, contact us and we will delete the information.

11. International transfers

Garage Check is offered only in the United States, and your account, garage settings, check history, and snapshot images are stored in the United States (AWS, region us-east-1).

One step happens outside the United States, and you should know about it: each time a check runs, the snapshot leaves the US to be read by the door-state model. It travels from the United States to a server in Germany (European Union), and from there on to our own machine in the United Arab Emirates, where the reading is done. That is an international transfer of an image from your camera — first into the European Union, then into the United Arab Emirates. The German server is the front door of our analysis service: it is hosted by Contabo GmbH and it is where the encrypted connection is unwrapped, so your image passes through Contabo-operated infrastructure in unencrypted form before continuing to our hardware in the UAE. We keep no copy of the image on either machine — on ours in the UAE it is held in memory for the length of the check, never written to disk, and then discarded; on the German front door it is in transit only, and what that provider's own infrastructure records in transit is outside our control and not something we attest to — and only the reading comes back: whether the door is visible, its state, whether a vehicle is visible, whether it looks like night, and a confidence score. If our own server is unavailable, that same step happens instead in the United States on Amazon Bedrock. Full detail is in §4.

Erbacci LLC, the controller, is a company formed in Wyoming, United States. Wherever you use the Service from, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, and — for the analysis step above — in Germany and the United Arab Emirates. If you access the Service from the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, that means your information leaves it: those transfers rest on your consent to run the Service and on the contractual terms we hold with each provider named in §9. If you do not want your snapshots sent outside the United States, you can stop all checks at any time by unlinking the Ring integration or deleting your account (§8).

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy. If changes are material, we will notify you in-app before they take effect.

13. Contact

Erbacci LLC (Wyoming, United States), the data controller · info@erbacciltd.com