I have been playing around a bit more and I found a setup that achievs what I want. So I thought I just post it here.

First of all I have set alarm to go off only at night time by specifying a specific schedule in the menu-item "Alarm" in the device setting. This prevents from a sound alarm during daytime regardless if we are at home or not.

Secondly I created four smart actions:

1. A geofencing action to turn on privacy mode when I arrive home 

2. A geofencing action to turn off privacy mode when I leave home

3. An action to turn off privacy mode at midnight

4. An action to turn on privacy mode at 7am

With these actions I can achieve what I described.

However, there are still some issues.

When I arrive after midnight the camera will go in privacy mode and stay there the rest of the night which is not what I want.

There are a two options to solve this:

a. Specify in Action 1 that it will only be executed in the time between midnight and 7am. The problem with that in this case the alarm will go off if I arrive home after midnight.  I don't want to wake up the neighbours. 

b.  Define multiple Action 3's during specific times during the night (e.g. every half hour). This means that the alarm will only be disabled for a maximum of a half hour after  my arrival.

Another issue is geofencing two phones. To my understanding the geofencing actions will be triggered by the event if a phone arrives or leaves and not by continuously testing if one of the phones is still in the house. So if one of us will leave home while the other is still in the house in my setup the privacy mode will be turned off in my setup. I have not been able to test it because my wife is on vacation right now.

  @TonSt 

I have a potential solution for the two phones and checking if one is still home for you. Firstly I’m not sure how Geofencing works with 2 phones. If you have a single account/login running across both phones then I’m not sure how/if you can differentiate them via the automation. However if you have separate accounts then you can’t share the automations so you are in a bind.

What you need is 2 logical variables which are set when you/wife are home or not home. These two variables can be checked in your automation controlling privacy mode in the “if” condition to determine if the automation is executed. I.e. when the phone leaves home trigger an automation which has an “if” statement which checks that both phones are away and when arriving home check that only one of you is home, (i.e. arriving).

Now of course you are asking how do I create variables in Tapo automation… well there are 2 options for this, to create a variable with 2 values “On/off” which can be transposed to “Home/Away” for your purpose.

Option 1: using a completely logical variable within the Tapo automation. This will only work if both phones share a single login and therefore share the Automations, (I am not aware of being able to share automations across separate accounts). You will need to differentiate which phone is leaving home and I can’t see how you can do this with only one account, but if you can then here is how to create a logical variable in Tapo (you can also use this concept for other more complex automations).

• • https://community.tp-link.com/en/smart-home/threads/topic/748844?page=1

Option 2: This option is if you have separate accounts on your phones. In this option your and your wife’s Home/Away status can be maintained via 2 spare P100 switches which can be plugged in where they cannot be used. This is not ideal but should work.

• Name the P100 plugs as follows: “He is home?” and “She is home?”  - using real names would be better of course….
• Share the P100’s with your wife
• You can now create an automation on each of your phones to turn on the “She/He is home?” P100 when arriving home and turn off the “She/He is home?” P100 when leaving home – therefore indicating home/away status.
• Now in your automations you can refer to this status in the “If” statement. I.e.
  • when I leave home, if “She is home” is off then execute the actions (i.e. you are both away from home)
  • when I arrive home, if “She is home” is off then execute the actions (i.e. you are the only one home)
  • when something else happens – i.e. a set time trigger, if She is away and he is away do something or if She is home or he is home do something… 
• Of course having separate accounts means duplicating some automations on her phone, i.e. when your wife gets home can only trigger on her account and it will need to run the automation from her phone.
• Unfortunately using a trigger from the P100 turning on when your wife arrives home to execute an automation in your account will not work. As unfortunately P100 on/off triggers will only trigger an automation when they are either manually turned on/off or turned on/off via a shortcut or turned on/off from an internal device schedule. It will not trigger another automation if turned on/off via an automation. Note sure if this is a feature or a bug!!

Here is a lot of info in the above, so a lot to digest. Feel free to ask questions/clarifications.

Hi @Rbuck ,

Thanks for your reply. Very interesting. I was already thinking of using the "If"-option in the geofencing automation but here was no option to test if one of the phones is still at home. 

I have read the article that you referenced but I have difficulty to wrap my brains around the concept and how to use it in this particular case. 

One thing that is very peculiar is that once this dummy action is created referencing itself it does not show up in the list of actions, so I cannot change is anymore or delete it. After I created it I did not see it in the list of actions and I thought I forgot to save it and created it again but that also did nto appear in te list. Nevertheless, I can select it in the "If"-option for another action and there I see the dummy action. Actually two duplicates since apparently I did create two identical dummies. I have no way of editing or removing slef-referencing dummies.

But anyway, can you give me a bit more detailed explanation how to use them in a two-phone geofencing system?

EDIT: I have read the post about creating the Global variable again and I think I am beginning to understand. I guess it is a system to create a variable that can have two states: on or off. In my case it would be called something like "Nobody home?", so I can test if either my wife or I am still at home when one of us leaves home in the Leave-automation. That's it, right?

Thanks again!