American Made
Written in Florida. Hosted in Ohio. Answerable to you.
Chameleon Lighting is a Florida company. We are headquartered in Niceville, in the Free State of Florida, and every part of this system was built here: the phone app, the web app, the cloud that ties them together, and the firmware running on the controller screwed to your house.
There is no offshore development team, no outsourced contract shop, and no third party with a copy of the source. When you ask who wrote the software that controls the lights on your home, the answer is a business you can call, in a town you can drive to.
The specifics
Three questions worth asking of any connected product, answered plainly.
Who builds it
Chameleon Lighting, headquartered in Niceville, Florida. All software development is conducted in the Free State of Florida — app, cloud and firmware alike.
Hardware is assembled and programmed here before it ships.
Where it runs
On Amazon Web Services, an American company, in their US East (Ohio) region — a data centre in Columbus, Ohio.
Your account, your schedules, the content you make and the state of your controllers are stored there and nowhere else.
Who is accountable
A named American business, operating under Florida and United States law, with a phone number that reaches a person.
If something goes wrong with your data, there is a company in this country that answers for it — not a support form in another jurisdiction.
Ohio is close, and that is not just a talking point
When you tap a colour in the app, the command travels from your phone to our servers and back down to your controller. Hosting that round trip in the middle of the country means it crosses a few states rather than an ocean, so lights on a house in Florida respond to a phone in Florida in a fraction of a second.
The same trip through a server on another continent is a noticeably slower one, and it is slower every single time you use it. Where the servers sit is a feature you feel, not paperwork.
What we do not do with your information
This is not a promise about our intentions. It is a description of what the software contains.
- We do not sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone, and not in aggregate.
- There is no analytics or tracking software in the app. No advertising SDK, no crash reporting, no attribution or install-tracking library. There is nothing to opt out of because there is nothing there.
- We do not build a profile of you. We store what running your lights requires — your account, your content, your controllers — and that is the whole list.
- We never receive your Wi-Fi password. It goes from your phone to the controller over an encrypted local connection and stops there.
- We do not track your location. A location is used for one thing, sunrise and sunset, and the coarse reading taken for it is rounded to roughly a kilometre on your phone before it is sent anywhere.
- You can delete everything yourself, immediately, from the app or a browser, without asking us.
Your lights do not depend on us
The controller is not a shell that needs a server to think. The whole effect engine, every schedule and all of your saved content run on the chip in the box, on your own network. Cut the internet and the lights keep their calendar, keep their colours, and keep answering your phone over your own Wi-Fi.
You can run a Chameleon controller with no account at all, for free, and never send us a byte. The cloud adds control from anywhere and the shared content library — it is not the thing that makes the lights work. A company should have to earn the connection, not hold your hardware hostage for it.
- See the free local firmware
The exceptions, stated plainly
Three lookup services the app uses are not American-run, and we would rather name them than let you find them: OpenStreetMap Nominatim and TimeAPI turn a city into a time zone when you set your location, and Pexels runs the search when you browse the stock artwork library.
Those requests go directly from your phone, carry no account information, and never include a precise coordinate. Nothing about your account, your household or your controllers is stored anywhere but the American servers described above. Every third party that touches any part of the Service is listed in the privacy policy.
Questions about any of this?
Ask. We would rather answer a hard question than have you take a claim on faith.