How UniFi Protect Protects Your Data

UniFi Protect is designed to give you full ownership and control over your surveillance data—without compromising on performance, convenience, or intelligence. Unlike many cloud-based systems, Protect stores your videos and AI events locally. Your data stays yours.

We Never See Your Video

When you access Protect, your client device connects to your UniFi OS Console through an end-to-end encrypted channel. Our Site Manager service helps establish this secure connection by verifying your identity, but it does not have access to any video. Once the secure session is established, your data flows from your console to your remote device.

We cannot view, store, or access your video streams at any point.

For more information on how Protect connections work, read Getting Started with UniFi Protect.

Recordings Stay Local

All video recordings are stored locally on your UniFi OS Console, such as the UNVR or Cloud Gateway Max. You are in full control of your data retention, storage configuration, and access policies. There's no cloud backup of your video by default.

For a deeper dive into Protect’s retention and storage settings, check out Managing Storage and Retention in UniFi Protect.

AI is Local, Too

UniFi Protect delivers powerful AI features without compromising data privacy. All detection, recognition, and AI-enhanced video processing happens on your local network, not in the cloud.

We offer multiple ways to bring advanced computer vision to your deployment:

• In-camera AI: Our G4, G5, and AI Series cameras perform person/vehicle detection and facial recognition entirely on-device.
• AI-Port: Enables AI acceleration for third-party RTSP cameras, adding Smart Detections even when using non-UniFi video sources.
• AI-Key: Enhances your UniFi Protect system with centralized computer vision processing, enabling detections for multiple camera streams.

Learn more in Advanced AI Features in UniFi Protect.

Encrypted Video

As an additional layer of security, UniFi Protect offers stream encryption between your cameras and UniFi OS Console. This helps prevent unauthorized interception of video feeds as they travel across your local network.

This is separate from the default end-to-end encryption already in place between your client device and the UniFi OS Console—meaning both remote access and internal video streams are protected.

To enable encryption for supported cameras:

1. Navigate to Settings > System > Advanced.
2. Enable Stream Encryption—this applies to all compatible cameras in your system.

Encryption is supported on G4, G5 and AI Series cameras, in UniFi Protect v5.2.42 and later.