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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/02/google-recovers-deleted-nest-video-in-high-profile-abduction-case/ [arstechnica.com]

Like most cloud-enabled home security cameras, Google’s Nest products don’t provide long-term storage unless you pay a monthly fee. That video may not vanish into the digital aether right on time, though. Investigators involved with the high-profile abduction of Nancy Guthrie have released video from Guthrie’s Nest doorbell camera—video that was believed to have been deleted because Guthrie wasn’t paying for the service.
[...]
If you don’t pay anything, Google only saves three hours of event history. After that, the videos are deleted, at least as far as the user is concerned.
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Expired videos are no longer available to the user, and Google won’t restore them even if you upgrade to a premium account later. However, that doesn’t mean the data is truly gone. Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her home in the early hours of February 1, and at first, investigators said there was no video of the crime because the doorbell camera was not on a paid account. Yet, video showing a masked individual fiddling with the camera was published on February 10 [fbi.gov].
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In statements made by investigators, the video was apparently “recovered from residual data located in backend systems.” It’s unclear how long such data is retained or how easy it is for Google to access it. Some reports claim that it took several days for Google to recover the data.
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There is a temptation to ascribe some malicious intent to Google’s video storage setup. After all, this video expired after three hours, but here it is nine days later. That feels a bit suspicious on the surface, particularly for a company that is so focused on training AI models that feed on video.
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every event recorded by the camera is going to Google’s servers, and it’s probably recoverable long past the deletion timeline [google.com] stipulated in the company’s policy.
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there are still more traditional “DVR” security cameras, which record footage to dedicated local storage. Many NAS boxes also have support for storing and managing video from select security cameras. If you’re sending video to the cloud, you can’t expect it will be totally gone even if you no longer have access to it.

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