The short version. Okami Cam sends your camera from your phone to your own computer, over your own local network. It has no servers. Nothing is sent to the developer, nothing is sent to any third party, no account exists, there is no analytics, no advertising and no crash reporting. Your video is never written to storage by either app.
Okami Cam is made by Julia Eileen Schäfer, an individual developer. She is the entity named in the Google Play listing and the sole party responsible for this software. There is no company, no team and no data processor acting on her behalf.
The table covers everything either app touches. "Leaves the device" means leaves your phone; in every case the only possible destination is a computer on your own network that you have paired.
| What | Why | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Camera video | It is the product — the video becomes a webcam on your computer | Encoded on the phone and streamed over your local Wi‑Fi to the paired computer. Held in memory only, for as long as it takes to send. Never written to storage, never sent to the internet, never seen by the developer. |
| Battery percentage | So the desktop can warn you before the phone dies mid‑call | A single number, sent to the paired computer every 30 seconds inside the same stream. Nowhere else. |
| Phone model and manufacturer | So you can tell which phone is which in the desktop's device list | Broadcast on your local network as part of the standard mDNS service announcement, alongside your phone's network address. See the note below. |
| Pairing code | So only a computer you approve can turn the camera on | Six digits generated on the phone and stored only on the phone. The desktop stores a copy once you type it, in your user configuration directory. |
| Name of the computer that paired | So you can tell whose computer used your camera, and when | Sent by that computer during pairing, stored on the phone and shown on the app screen. Never sent anywhere. |
| Camera settings and profiles | So the app remembers your resolution, frame rate and orientation | Stored on your computer only. |
No name, email, account or identifier of any kind. No advertising ID, Android ID, IMEI, serial number or MAC address. No location. No contacts. No microphone or audio. No photos or files from your device. No analytics, telemetry or crash reporting. No advertising, attribution or crash‑reporting SDK is present. The only libraries the app bundles are Google's AndroidX, CameraX and Material components, none of which send anything off the device.
No data is transferred to any third party — no company, no organisation, no service provider, no advertiser, no analytics vendor. There is no server to receive it. The only destination any of your data reaches is a computer you own and have paired.
Neither app makes any connection to the internet. The Android app opens exactly one network port on your local network and speaks only to the computer that connects to it.
Pairing. The phone shows a six‑digit code and refuses every connection that does not present it, so a device on the same Wi‑Fi cannot turn your camera on. Codes are generated with a cryptographically secure random number generator, compared in constant time, and repeated wrong guesses lock further attempts out for increasing periods. You can generate a new code at any time; doing so immediately disconnects whatever is connected, which is how you revoke a computer's access.
What this does not protect against. The video travels across your local network without encryption. Someone who is already on your Wi‑Fi and able to capture network traffic could reconstruct it. Use Okami Cam on a network you trust, and treat an untrusted public Wi‑Fi as unsuitable. Encrypting the stream is planned.
Your local network sees your phone. Device discovery works by announcing the app on the local network, which is how the desktop finds your phone without you typing an address. That announcement includes your phone's model, manufacturer and network address, and any device on the same network can see it while the app is running. This is inherent to how discovery works; closing the app stops the announcement.
On your computer. The virtual camera appears at
/dev/video10, which by design any application on that machine with permission
to that device can read. That is what makes it usable as a webcam. While a stream is
running the desktop app also serves the live picture to its own window over a
loopback‑only address that nothing outside your computer can reach, protected by a random
token generated for that session, and that server stops when the stream stops.
The developer retains nothing, because the developer receives nothing. There is no database, no backup and no log on any server.
Because no personal data ever reaches the developer, there is no account to close and no deletion request to make. Uninstalling both apps removes everything either of them stored.
Okami Cam is a utility for connecting a phone to a computer and is not directed to children. It collects no personal data from anyone, and therefore none from children.
Installing the Linux app from the Okami Cam APT repository means your computer's package manager periodically contacts GitHub Pages to check for updates, on whatever schedule your system runs updates. GitHub can see your IP address in that request, as it can for any software you download. That is your package manager, not the app: neither app makes any network connection of its own beyond your local network.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the previous wording remains in the public version history of the repository that hosts this page. A change that materially affects what the apps do with your data will be called out in the release notes of the version that introduces it.
Questions about privacy, or about anything on this page: julia_eileen@outlook.com.
You can also open an issue at the public issue tracker, though for privacy matters email is better.
