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The other explanations here don't explain the long delay between the start of the investigation and the release of the footage. Yes, storing customer data is what we'd expect from Google and yes, the FBI can coerce Google to provide this data for their investigations. But it does not take a week for Google to find a file on their servers.

My hunch is that Google initially tried to play dumb to avoid compliance, as to not reveal they do in fact retain customer data. They had a plausible excuse as well -- the owner had no subscription so they don't store the data -- and took a gamble that this explanation would suffice until the situation resolved itself. I suspect that authorities initially took Google's excuse at face value, since they parroted this explanation to the public as well. As pressure mounted on authorities to make some headway on the case, they likely formally exercised whatever legal mechanisms they have at their disposal to force Google's hand, and only then was the footage released.

This is a wild claim. I would think criminal charges for something like obstruction would be possible if Google intentionally hid this from investigators for up to a week. That could result in the difference between the victim being found alive or not.

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Why are we overthinking this? It was disconnected by the kidnapper, not erased by him. All the FBI has to do is reconnect it (or even just find the MAC address) and wait for Google to provide them the footage via a request.

https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...

I heard that Nancy Guthrie was not paying for the subscription that let her view her old video footage. So it's interesting that Google was still storing all that footage.

The google/ring backbone service people are likely disconnected from google's money collecting people. It is probably just easier to collect all of it and then check for payments only when users login to get at the footage. Otherwise, every fetch of footage from a camera would trigger a query to the payment system.

It is easier to constantly upload video rather than check a boolean if current customer? An active customer status is not something that changes per second. Can easily be cached for multiple hours.

I think that even free users get recent videos saved, but I'm not positive. If videos are constantly being uploaded, why bother checking?

If I don't pay, they should not store footage. What is so difficult about that?

If you don't want them to store footage, don't buy a cloud connected camera

Yes. People need to stop treating corporations as if they will honor the spirit of an agreement instead of whatever interpretation gains them the most value.

AI training data is valuable. They're not going to just throw it away.

With Google, you are the product. Those that pay for their services just add more to their bank account. There is a reason they removed _Don't be Evil_. Decouple and move on from them is the only thing you can do.

What does the ToS that you agree to say about the matter? That’s the controlling document.

"In particular, we sometimes make legally-required updates, which are modifications that keep digital content, services, or goods in conformity with the law. We make these updates to our digital content, services, and goods for safety or security reasons, and to make sure they meet the quality standards that you expect, such as those described in the Legal guarantee section. We may automatically install updates that address significant safety or security risks. For other updates, you can choose whether you want them installed."

"We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like email you write and receive, photos and videos you save, docs and spreadsheets you create, and comments you make on YouTube videos."

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I don't have a Nest but I suspect it's even simpler than that. She didn't have a subscription but the devices still store video locally up to the capacity of onboard storage. These recent local clips used to all be locally accessible but to "increase subscription value", Google started making that locally stored data inaccessible without subscription.

However, the local storage is just a rolling buffer and the clips beyond the last 10 seconds are still there in local RAM and either not shown in the interface or deleted in the file system (but just by blanking the name in the directory, not a secure overwrite erase). Either the FBI forensic data recovery people or Google/Nest finally ran a sector-by-sector file recovery. I'm just surprised it took so long. I assume maybe because the local storage on those doorbells isn't a removable SD card so they had to gain access some other way.

Frankly, I'm surprised how many people buy devices which are cloud-only. At this point, I generally won't consider any IOT devices if the manufacturer even offers an optional cloud subscription (unless the firmware is open source). Too many companies have now locked down previously open devices to force cloud subscription (looking at you Chamberlain/LiftMaster assholes).

EDIT TO ADD: Saw this Verge article by someone who bothered to find out how current Nest doorbells work. It basically confirms what I thought with the nuance that some local files actually get uploaded to the cloud even without a subscription but aren't accessible until the user pays. https://www.theverge.com/tech/877235/nancy-guthrie-google-ne...

The article even says "[...] some Nest devices record event histories and store them on-device. The third-gen wired Nest Doorbell can save up to 10 seconds of clips, while the first and second-gen wired doorbells can save up to three hours of event history, all without a subscription.".

>The third-gen wired Nest Doorbell can save up to 10 seconds of clips, while the first and second-gen wired doorbells can save up to three hours of event history

Wow, the march of progress.

It's like you can see the moment they started gaining market share and could deliver shittier products.

It’s all optimization.

> Should you get rid of your Nest camera over privacy concerns?

Absolutely, and you shouldn't have bought and installed this garbage in the first place. Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you for Google's benefit, much like the rest of their dis-services (email, cloud storage, mobile operating systems).

If you absolutely need surveillance cameras for your safety, use generic IP cameras connected to your own NVR (network video recorder), possibly with Frigate for offline AI processing and notifications. Nothing should ever leave your network; the data should be encrypted and only shared with the police when it is in your interest.

I have that sort of arrangement. I've been wondering though. What's the proper data access protocol? Like I want it available, easily, if the police need it and I'm not there but at the same time, I don't want anyone to just screw around with it because I've got directions and password printed on paper somewhere.

We did have some repeated night time visitors (long story, but it was some mistaken identity that took a while to sleuth out) it wasn't difficult to export data for the police but it wasn't something I'd just ask my wife or kids to do either. Scan the footage, find the timestamps, export the data then upload the data somewhere where they can get at it. It wasn't hard but it was chores and it took time with high emotions.

First off, it's not inexpensive. It's not a giant investment either but my cameras cost in the same range as the Nest cameras do and then there is a relatively powerful mini pc, and an accelerator for AI detection and then drives to store the data, PoE switch, network segmentation... I'm rocking home assistant and frigate and 8 8k cameras. Then the much more subtle part is I have a pretty good idea when I'd like the police to have all the data and when I don't want that. That's not so easy if I was abducted. Perhaps an off the shelf complete solution is better and has that sort of law enforcement access situation sorted out. This is sort of the 0.000001% kind of thing though. Over the years, I've replaced drives a couple times too, it's becomes a living and breathing system that needs support and love.

>if the police need it and I'm not there

How often is that going to happen?

If it's because you're missing and they need to investigate: every time.

The problem is that your advice doesn't work for 99% of the customer base. Go the average person "if you absolutely need surveillance cameras for your safety, use generic IP cameras connected to your own NVR (network video recorder), possibly with Frigate for offline AI processing and notifications." and see what they say. It's important to remember if you are on this site you are an extreme minority and the average person isn't even aware enough to think about these things, let alone set up their own offline AI video processor.

You can get camera+NVR combos at Costco.

Fair point, but security cameras, despite their name, do very little for your security as evidenced by the news. Most people don't need one, and only have Rings/Nests and other similar spyware because of a combination of fearmongering, aggressive marketing, and pricing subsidized by data collection (spyware). If you truly fear for your safety, you should purchase a shotgun, not a Nest camera.

In any case, when you don't have the skills required to do something, you can hire someone who does. I pay a plumber because I don't have plumbing skills and tools, so it's not unreasonable to pay someone to set up a local camera system for you if you want one.

Cameras do more than just that kind of security.

Our camera has been of great use. In fact has largely made us money. We had an incident where a fire truck damaged our car in the street with its hose. We thought a kid with a bat did the damage at first. The camera though showed the real culprit. When we told the fire department they denied it and said there were no firetrucks in the area. We sent the video footage and then they sent a city lawyer with a checkbook.

I had a situation where a tree limb fell on to an early morning garbage truck. The truck transported the limb a few hundred feet. It then Slid off and smashed thru my van window. It started to rain. I appeared shortly after trying to figure out how a 10’ heavy limb would smash thru my window, things are just starting to get wet, and there are no trees around.

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>Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you for Google's benefit, much like the rest of their dis-services (email, cloud storage, mobile operating systems).

I know! i’d sure hate for Google and the police to be able to identify someone who has kidnapped and/or perhaps murdered me. I’ll be uninstalling all my cameras immediately. Whose with me? /s

(Notwithstanding: My cameras thermostats etc all go through a wrt3200 router logged into expressvpn on a dedicated ssid/vlan . Amazon and Google pissed me off purchasing Ring and Nest (respectively) so they can plug that into their advertising bullshit and that was my reaction to both of those companies… they get iot devices connecting from some vultr VPS or whatever, and the other way they get you is with all the crap and trackers in their smartphone apps — at least according to Exodus Project - so THATS on a burner android piped through the same SSID too.)

Granted some of that’s by necessity because half the apps for this kind of crap aren’t available in the Mexico iTunes Store but I’ll just shut up now.

> i’d sure hate for Google and the police to be able to identify someone who has kidnapped and/or perhaps murdered me.

You seem to overlook the more likely scenario where the camera is used against you in some way, whether by a government agency or for tracking and profiling by tech companies. You also, perhaps involuntarily, enable surveillance of your neighbors, family and friends.

For most people, those same family and friends are often more of an (actual) risk than the gov’t, especially the current gov’t right now.

The current gov’t is going after minorities in high profile, low effectiveness sweeps to ragebait everyone. That by definition is only going to impact a very tiny percentage of the population at once.

> Their primary purpose is not to protect you but to spy on you

Here I was thinking the primary purpose was to see who's at the door and check if Doordash and packages have been delivered. We've also used them to "spy" on our cats to be sure they're using the litter box while on vacation, and even to "spy" on wildlife in our backyard.

Not everything needs to be a conspiracy. These devices are useful and practical and have value.

Also, lest it get lost in the chorus of voices telling us to throw these things out: the actual news here is that the device appears to have provided an actual evidentiary lead in the investigation of an actual (and horrifying) crime. That has value too, even if kidnappings are rare.

Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.

They're not architecturally delivering the video a different way if you pay than if you don't. They're just changing the retention period.

This video was probably recovered from cache somewhere.

There was an article the other day called something like "How is Google helping the investigation?"

It said she didn't have a cloud subscription, but that there are data pipelines that make these sort of devices work. (Imagine there's a thumbnail of the video in the product somewhere, so there's a pipeline that takes a video stream and generates thumbnails.)

According to the article, it was a matter of having someone figure out which pipelines her videos might have touched, and then go looking to see if there were any ephemeral artifacts that hadn't been lost yet.

saw this cnn article that discusses a similar theory. it was unclear to me whether the source of the article is purely speculation.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/tech/google-video-nancy-guthr... and archived at https://archive.ph/oZyRM

The guy writing a thumbnail pipeline isn't getting petabytes (exabytes?) of storage to cache all videos from the past week in their entirety. If this quantity of data is being stored, it's being stored deliberately and at significant cost.

> Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.

No consumer product should have users do port-forwarding or punch holes in the firewall. You don't want an IoT device on your network accepting packets from the internet.

The proper way to do this is with a cloud server arbitrating connections, which is what a lot of products do.

The reason most consumers want cloud storage isn't for ease of access, though. It's because they want the footage stored securely somewhere. If the thief can just pick up your camera and walk away with the evidence, it's not very useful to you.

Some (ironically the cheap Chinese ones) use UDP hole punching for a P2P connection. Assumedly because it saves server costs.

Nest cameras upload video clips to the cloud without an active subscription.

This fact is explained right in the Google support page linked by this article

> *The 3 hours of event video previews is available without a Google Home Premium subscription for the Nest Cam (battery) and Nest Doorbell (battery).

All of these articles trying to spin this as some surprise revelation are getting old.

The surprise revelation is that the footage is still recoverable after 3 hours.

Because online journalism is journalism jr. and they can't be bothered to do basic research on their story.

anecdotally i've had this conversation with 3 people (engineers) at my work today.

They all thought it was crazy that without a subscription they're recording and uploading video.

One person asked 'Why are we paying for a subscription if it's not for the storage and processing?'

Another started talking about flock and ice right after.

This reminds me of when people were surprised that Alexa devices listen all the time. Yes, cloud connected device is uploading data to the cloud. That is not very scandalous or interesting. The FBI didn't burn zero days to do this, they simply asked Google for it.

> This reminds me of when people were surprised that Alexa devices listen all the time

Alexa devices are not recording audio and uploading it all to the cloud all the time.

Nest cameras are designed to upload recordings to the cloud, even without subscription. It's literally one of the selling points.

The CBC report yesterday on tv mentioned the awkward phrase the it was recovered “buried deep in servers” and I thought it was bizarre.

Replay available on YouTube. CBC the national.

I suspect that it really might have been 'buried deep'. If you are capturing the data short term, to allow a small scroll back, then you wrote the data to some storage system. At three hours or whatever the short term storage limit is, you delete the file. Usually deleting a file leaves the data intact on the storage device. Only the file entry and a list of what low level storage blocks actually contained data. It could take awhile before the data is actually overwritten. Up until the point it is, you could scan the contents of unallocated blocks looking for the data. It could theoretically take awhile to find a customer id or something else that helps you identify the deleted data.

This is correct. It has to be buried below the frost line else we would have frozen footage.

The guy did seem to be wearing a warm coat and gloves so obviously pretty cold where the video was, probably just below the frost line.

They ultimately found it sandwiched between the videos of epstein uncut jail cell footage and Jan 6's lost video exhibits.

Don't they have a battery backup and a local buffer before uploading? It probably had its last footage still stored locally, using the remnants of power in its internal battery.

She apparently didn't have a subscription so it shouldn't have been uploading anywhere... however things get murky with notification settings.

Normally we would expect no subscription means no video uploaded, but it doesn't HAVE to mean that. IF you distill it, it really only means the Ring doorbell owner doesn't get access to any video or features without paying.

There's no reason they, however, won't still derive value from it without a subscription by recording and reselling that data somehow. That's probably how they got this footage. All the subscription does it help subsidize their surveillance network and let you use it a little bit.

I guess I don't have to renew my Ring subscription then. If things go awry I can just ask FBI to ask Amazon for the footage.

Sure, if whatever case you need Ring camera footage for is important enough to get FBI involved.

Distill it?

Eh, it's not a terrible usage. I give it 7/10 for artistic license.

It's a pretty darn normal usage:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/sentences/distill

I'll take a 7 out of 10.

Even if it isn't uploading, the hardware must have local storage. It may be small and persistently overwritten, but if the power was severed, then the last data on that drive would be the last thing written before the power was cut.

The hardware was uploading even without a subscription.

A lot of these cameras don't store anything locally unless you add an SD card, which die all the time.

I thought they just give you reduced storage on the free tier? If so, then its obvious that it is still uploading motion related events.

If it was still uploading events then why did it take so long to recover?

free tier saves 3 hrs of event history, then deletes. so it appears that this request came in later than limited ‘save’ window offered on the free tier.

The camera was supposedly disconnected fwiw

> She apparently didn't have a subscription so it shouldn't have been uploading anywhere..

Nest cameras upload event footage even without a subscription.

It's not a secret. It's a selling point for the devices.

Or... yet another full-on spying device. Like all phones, like all modern TVs, smart speakers/home systems, cars, anything electronic capable of recording its environment is doing it, for the sole purpose of uploading it to be stored and analyzed.

There are some limits of course but they are mostly technological, but this ain't some notification trickle but full pictures when you expect zero, zilch, nothing.

I'd never install such device at home, added value is dubious at best for my family life and this is exactly the type of shit I would expect to be happening in it, regardless of brand or country of origin. If it connects it sends. Its sad state of things in 2026 but thats reality right now.

>If it connects it sends.

More broadly, if it connects, it will serve other masters besides you.

Short, sweet, true.

I'm fairly certain that Nest cameras do not allow streaming over your local network.

You can still use the cameras even without a subscription, i.e. watch the live stream or get notifications. This means that yes, they are absolutely uploading data to the cloud and storing it for some undetermined window. Paying for a subscription seems to just give you access to that history.

When the Nest camera was reconnected, the camera uploaded all the cached footage. Google then handed the footage to the FBI, no warrants needed as it's part of an ongoing case and Google is usually pretty friendly with the government (and vice ver-sa)

>> no warrants needed as it's part of an ongoing case ...

Thats a rather chilling interpretation of the law. Every case is ongoing until trial.

Current reality is that the government does not need a warrant for evidence given freely to them. Google has a level of ownership of any video file uploaded to their servers, and are allowed to just say "Here you go" to the cops, regardless of your opinion.

3rd party doctrine is being used to eliminate your 4th amendment rights.

The Nest doorbell wasn't set to save recordings, so how did the FBI get it?

I'm not familiar with Nest, if you don't have a subscription to store video, and someone rings your doorbell, and you take 5 seconds to bring it up in the app, can you scroll back and see those 5 seconds? Or is it literally a feed from the camera to the app over bluetooth? Probably not. The video stream probably gets sent to some backend system and, while she didn't pay for storage, it probably persists for a few hours to days in cache.

Not set to save recordings likely means "saved in a memory buffer and never given a file handle", that is how most consumer recording devices that offer limited playback work.

I recently had to attempt to piece together dash cam footage from my wife's car in the same way when she witnessed an accident but the file had been "aged out".

Last sentence of the article.

Unfortunately, we don't have a definitive answer at this time, even if the theory is sound

is it not possible to have these doorcams blur or obscure parts of the video that is beyond certain distance from the camera? It would great if that was made a requirement for them.

Surely their storage backend is not a Linux box with EXT4 but something akin to Google Spanner so there data recovery would possible days later if they looked very hard enough ?.

The video was likely recovered from local flash memory on the camera itself. These kinds of devices are not uploading raw video to the cloud.

There are several reasons for that. The first is that you cannot rely on connectivity 100% of the time. Second, if you can have the camera run image processing and compression locally, you don't have to dedicate a massive amount of processing resources at the data center to run the processing. Imagine ten or a hundred million cameras. Where would you want the image processing to run? Right.

My guess is that they either went to Google to perhaps connect the camera to a sandboxed testing rig that could extract locally-stored video data or they removed the flash device, offloaded the raw data and then extracted video from that data. This last option could also have the advantage of having less compression (architecture dependent).

Decades ago I was personally involved in recovering and helping analyze surveillance video data for the prosecution in the OJ Simpson case. Back then, it was tape.

One of the techniques that was considered (I can't publicly state what was actually done) was to digitize raw data right off the read heads on the VCR's spinning drum. You could then process this data using advanced algorithms which could produce better results than the electronics in even the most expensive professional tape players of he era.

Once you step away from the limitations of a product --meaning, you are not engineering a product, you are mining for information-- all kinds of interesting and creative out-of-the-box opportunities present themselves.

The Nest footage is conclusive and unambiguous.

Nancy Guthrie was apprehended by ICE agents and deported to Australia.

  =======

Customs agent: “G‘day sir. Have you got a criminal record?”

Irishman: “M‘Lord, no! I didn’t realise that one was still required!”