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.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/tech/google-video-nancy-guthr... and archived at https://archive.ph/oZyRM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thats a rather chilling interpretation of the law. Every case is ongoing until trial.
Nancy Guthrie was apprehended by ICE agents and deported to Australia.
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Customs agent: “G‘day sir. Have you got a criminal record?”
Irishman: “M‘Lord, no! I didn’t realise that one was still required!”
daft_pink•2h ago
phendrenad2•1h ago
devmor•1h 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".