- Google and the FBI have released Nest Video Doorbell footage of Nancy Guthrie’s apparent abductor
- Normally, video recordings are deleted without a subscription to Nest Aware or Google Home Premium
- Nancy Guthrie was not a subscriber, raising questions about how Google obtained the footage
Without a Nest Aware (the name for the old subscription service on older Nest devices) or Google Home Premium account, the situation is completely different.
According to Google support pages:
“If you do not have a subscription:
Your camera saves up to 6 hours of activity before it expires and is deleted.
Nest Camera Indoor (wired, 3rd generation), Nest Camera Outdoor (wired, 2nd generation) and Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd generation) offer up to 6 hours of event video previews with up to 10 second clips.
Older cameras offer up to 3 hours event-based with clips up to 5 minutes.”
The six-hour window is important because, according to the timeline, nine hours passed between the Nest camera being disconnected and removed from the home and the Guthrie family realizing 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie was missing.
When the FBI released the video 10 days after Guthrie’s abduction, law enforcement officials wrote in a post: “The FBI and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department have been in close collaboration with our private partners to continue to recover photos or video recordings from Nancy Guthrie’s home that may have been lost, destroyed or unavailable due to a number of factors, including the removal of recording devices. The video was recovered from residual data located in backend systems.”
I added bold to highlight the relevant parts. It’s hard to read it any other way than when the Nest Video Doorbell cam data was found in the cloud and with the help of Google.
If Nancy Guthrie wasn’t a subscriber, Nest pretty much just acknowledged that they keep some photos in the cloud for all Nest users and that the FBI used a warrant or just another deal to access them from Nest/Googlehttps://t.co/X5YhoHY7pr10 February 2026
Again, this is net good news. There is a wealth of information investigators can glean from that footage. But the existence of these recordings raises some questions about what video data Google stores, even for those who do not pay for Google Home Premium or Nest Aware.
It’s not like someone at Google just kept digging through closets, rummaging through shelves and stacks and stumbled upon this video data. There is a process for these things, an automated system.
How it works
I have an aging Nest Outdoor Cam in the back of my home. Through it and on the Google Home app, I can watch a live video feed and short clips triggered by sound and motion. I don’t have a Premium account, so the video clips are constantly being deleted and are always gone within a few hours.
Some I’ve spoken to on social media point to Google’s process for deleting videos upon request. But this assumes that Google stores them and that you have an Aware or Premium account. Without such an account, you’re telling Google, “Don’t save my video. Don’t save my data.”
Yes, there is a bit of data stored for a temporary period, but anything beyond that would be outside of the agreement between Google and its customers. Google cannot store your data without permission.
Incidentally, this is also how it works with Nest’s main video doorbell competitor Ring. Asked about the matter, Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff told Fox News, “I know with Ring specifically, if you delete a recording or if you don’t want a recording, you don’t have a subscription. We don’t store that. I know because I built the systems with my team.”
Questions for Google
The question of how the FBI obtained the data is more obvious. If Google knew they had it, they probably, with the consent of the Guthrie family, handed it over. If there were legal concerns, the FBI could have issued an arrest warrant, and Google, seeking legal cover, would have released it after it was processed. That may be the reason for the 10 day delay.
However, the other possibility is that it took 10 days to find because the FBI and Google went looking for pieces of data and eventually discovered a backend system that was inadvertently storing Nest video data.
Maybe it was an older Nest system. Google bought the company in 2014 and maintained separate Nest accounts and apps for many years afterward. The full consolidation and removal of the Nest app has only happened in recent years. A small amount of Nest Cam Video data storage processes that are not captured in the consolidation process are possible.
In either case, this is just luck and the best lead the authorities have to bring Guthrie back home.
However, it would be helpful for Google to provide some clarity on how this happened and what it actually means for the rest of us who own Nest Cams and don’t have an Aware or Premium subscription.
I have sent several emails to Google about the matter and have yet to receive a reply.
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