Fregata is a local-first NVR. Your camera streams and recordings live on your Mac and your network — we never see them. This page describes the limited data that the app and our licensing servers touch so that you can make an informed choice.
Information we collect
To verify your license and improve Fregata, your app periodically sends a signed heartbeat to our servers. Each heartbeat contains:
Required for license verification:
- Your license key
- A hardware identifier derived from your Mac’s
IOPlatformUUID (one-way hashed — we cannot recover the original UUID from the hash)
Technical telemetry (anonymous, opt-out available):
- Fregata version
- macOS version (major.minor, e.g., “14.3”)
- Mac model identifier (e.g., “Mac14,10”)
- Apple SoC name (e.g., “Apple M4 Pro”) — the chip family / tier, distinct from the model identifier above
- CPU architecture, core count, and memory size bucket (e.g., “16 GB”)
- Number of cameras configured (count only)
- Detector backend in use (CoreML / ONNX / CPU)
- Detector compute target you selected in
config.yml (e.g., “ane” for Apple Neural Engine, or “gpu”), and which compute units the detector actually ended up using — the two can differ, and seeing when they do is how we catch a build that quietly runs slower than it should - Most recent average inference time in milliseconds — a single number indicating how fast object detection is running on your hardware
- Whether the license check Fregata runs at launch had to retry, and how that turned out — one of a short fixed set of outcomes (e.g., “not_needed”). It tells us when a release has left installs running in a degraded mode.
- Approximate uptime and crash count since last heartbeat
- After a crash, an anonymous crash signature — the process that crashed, the OS signal (e.g., “SIGSEGV”), the error type, and an app-relative code location, plus how long that run had been alive, which Fregata build the code location belongs to, and how that location was identified (whether it is the exact point of failure or a nearby one). Never any log text, file paths, exception messages, or credentials.
Optional, user-provided:
- A short label (e.g., “Living Room Mac”) you may type into the optional “This Mac” field at activation. Used only to make the license-management page readable when you have more than one Mac. Leave the field blank and nothing is sent.
Information we do NOT collect
- Your IP address
- Your Mac’s hostname, user account name, or any other operating-system-level identifier — only the optional label you type at activation, if any (see “Optional, user-provided” above).
- Your email address, beyond the one associated with your license purchase
- Camera names, URLs, credentials, stream content, or any recording data
- File paths from your system (the crash signature’s code location is an app-relative module path like
frigate.record.maintainer.run:142 — never a filesystem path containing your username) - Anything from within your local network
How we use it
Technical telemetry helps us prioritize bug fixes, test against the Mac models and macOS versions our users actually run, and diagnose support requests. Your license key links this data to your purchase record so we can provide support; the telemetry itself contains no personally identifying information beyond the purchase email already on file.
Sharing
We do not sell, rent, or share this data with third parties. Data is stored in the EU or US region depending on your location.
Purchase data
Stripe processes all payments. We receive your email, transaction ID, and payment status from Stripe but never see or store your card details. Stripe’s privacy policy governs their handling of your payment information.
Contact
Privacy questions, or to request deletion of your license and associated telemetry: reply to your license email. We’ll honor the request within 30 days, retaining only what’s legally required for tax compliance.