BeddyBytes puts your family's privacy first
Our mission is simple: to help parents make the most of their baby's nap time, without compromising on their family's privacy.
Why I built BeddyBytes
In 2022, my wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby girl into the world. When our daughter slept, one of us would always stay near enough to hear when she woke. After a few weeks of this, we were starting to feel like we were tied to her cot. The obvious solution was, of course, to get a baby monitor. But which one?
The first category of baby monitors we looked at sent the video stream via the internet. As a software engineer, I found this concerning from a privacy point of view - and silly from an efficiency standpoint. Privacy is a concern because you're relying on a company's good security practices, which we all know from the continuous stream of data leaks in the news is laughable. The efficiency of these systems are also questionable; the vast majority of the time the monitor is less than 100m from the baby, but the video stream needs to travel from the camera at least a few 100km to the nearest data centre and back to the monitor, consuming internet bandwidth and adding latency in both directions.
The other type of system we looked at were the packs containing a camera and a monitor or two. These were more efficient but less flexible and can have their own security concerns. Less flexible because if you wanted additional cameras or monitors you'd have to buy a new pack, and are locked into a specific ecosystem. The security concerns for these systems are due to the encryption protocol (if any) used. In practice, if a weak encryption protocol is used, the baby monitor could give nearby bad actors eyes and ears inside your home.
How I built BeddyBytes
So, what is a software engineer to do? I created a secure and flexible app that solved these pain points. At the core of the app is a technology called WebRTC which allows devices to securely send video, audio and data peer to peer. By directly streaming video between the camera and monitor I achieved a number of benefits. First, the video never reaches the server so there is no risk of video being leaked by the server. Second, the video is transmitted over the local network so only a very small amount of internet bandwidth is required and latency is reduced. Third, WebRTC (and thus this baby monitor) uses TLS to secure the video stream in transit which means the same technology that is used to protect your credit card details is used to protect the video stream of your baby. Finally, WebRTC works on anything that can run a relatively modern web browser. This allowed us to reuse an old phone giving it a new purpose, reducing e-waste, and meant both my wife and I could use our existing devices (computers and phones) as monitors.