I bought one on AliExpress for just under 18 EUR. Mine works similarly, that it streams to some server in the cloud. I knew this, and only connected it for testing a little bit and made sure to not put my face or any of my documents etc in view of the camera.
The company behind the one I bought does seem to have a slightly better business model though. With them you can use it free to see live or you can pay them a monthly fee for recordings.
As for me my plan is to put it on a LAN without internet access and figure out how to get the video locally.
I use a Raspberry Pi to run a Tailscale subnet router on the LAN. I installed some cheap IP cams but blocked all Internet access so they can only access my LAN. With the Tailscale subnet router I can still get remote access to the camera streams from my phone.
The company behind the one I bought does seem to have a slightly better business model though. With them you can use it free to see live or you can pay them a monthly fee for recordings.
As for me my plan is to put it on a LAN without internet access and figure out how to get the video locally.