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.
A lot of these cameras don't store anything locally unless you add an SD card, which die all the time.
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.
More broadly, if it connects, it will serve other masters besides you.
Nest cameras upload event footage even without a subscription.
It's not a secret. It's a selling point for the devices.
Replay available on YouTube. CBC the national.
https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 own 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.
daft_pink•1h ago
phendrenad2•1h ago
devmor•57m ago
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".