When you connect a Tesla dashcam/Sentry drive, Dashcam Vault reads it to build the event inbox and multi-camera player. The drive itself is opened read-only — the app never writes to, modifies, or deletes anything on it. When you choose to archive an event, Dashcam Vault copies the clip files to a local archive folder on your Mac (or another drive you choose) and runs a SHA-256 checksum to confirm the copy is byte-for-byte identical to the original. None of this — the scan, the archive, the checksum — ever leaves your Mac or passes through a server we operate. We don't have a backend that receives your footage, so we have no copy of it and no way to see it.
If an event has a location, Dashcam Vault can show it on a map using Apple's MapKit. Showing that map means your Mac fetches map tiles from Apple for the visible area, the same way any Mac app using Apple Maps does. Apple's handling of that request is covered by Apple's own privacy policy. Outside of this map-tile fetch, Dashcam Vault makes no other network requests with your data.
Your archived clips, event metadata (timestamps, trigger reasons, verification checksums), and app settings are stored locally on your Mac using standard on-device storage. If you delete Dashcam Vault or your archive folder, this data is deleted with it. We recommend keeping a backup of anything you can't afford to lose — like any local file, it isn't protected from disk failure on its own.
Some Tesla firmware versions can encrypt Sentry and Dashcam clips at the source. Dashcam Vault detects these clips and can still archive and verify them byte-for-byte, but it cannot decrypt them — viewing an encrypted clip's contents requires Tesla's own tool. Encrypted files are handled the same way as any other file on your drive: read-only, copied locally, never transmitted anywhere.
Dashcam Vault doesn't collect personal information from anyone, including children, so there's nothing to disclose or protect beyond what's already described above.
If this policy changes, we'll update the effective date above and post the new version at the same location.