- Google and FBI released Nest Video Doorbell footage of Nancy Guthrie’s apparent kidnapper
- Usually, video footage is deleted without subscribing to Nest Aware or Google Home Premium.
- Nancy Guthrie was not a subscriber, raising questions about how Google obtained the images.
Without Nest Aware (the name of the old subscription service on older Nest devices) or a Google Home Premium account, the situation is quite different.
According to Google Support Pages:
“If you don’t have a subscription:
Your camera records up to 6 hours of activity before expiring and being deleted.
Nest Camera Indoor (Wired, 3rd Gen), Nest Camera Outdoor (Wired, 2nd Gen), and Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Gen) provide up to 6 hours of video previews of events with clips up to 10 seconds long.
Older cameras offer up to 3 hours of event-based recording with clips up to 5 minutes long.”
This six-hour window is important because, according to the timeline, nine hours passed between the disconnection and removal of the Nest camera from the home and the time the Guthrie family realized 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie was missing.
When the FBI released the video ten days after Guthrie’s kidnapping, law enforcement wrote in a message: “The FBI and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department have been work closely with our private sector partners to continue to recover any images or video footage from Nancy Guthrie’s home that may have been lost, corrupted or inaccessible due to various factors, including the removal of recording devices. Video was retrieved from residual data located in backend systems“.
I added bolding to highlight the relevant parts. It’s hard to read this in any other way than discovering Nest Video Doorbell camera data in the cloud and with the help of Google.
If Nancy Guthrie was not a subscriber, Nest simply admitted that they kept certain images in the cloud for all Nest users and that the FBI used a warrant or just another agreement to access them from Nest/Googlehttps://t.co/X5YhoHY7prFebruary 10, 2026
Once again, this is good news. Investigators can glean a wealth of information from these images. However, the existence of these images raises some questions about the video data Google stores, even for those who don’t pay for Google Home Premium or Nest Aware.
It’s not like someone at Google kept rummaging through cupboards, digging through shelves and stacks, and came across 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 house. Through it and on the Google Home app, I can see a live video feed and short clips triggered by sound and motion. I don’t have a Premium account, so the video clips are deleted gradually and always disappear after a few hours.
Some I’ve spoken to on social media point out Google’s process for removing videos on demand. But that assumes Google stores them and you have an Aware or Premium account. Without such an account, you’re telling Google: “Don’t store my video. Don’t store my data.”
Yes, some data is stored for a temporary period, but anything beyond that would fall outside the agreement between Google and its customers. Google cannot store your data without permission.
By the way, this is also how it works with Ring, Nest’s main video doorbell competitor. When asked about the case, Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff told Fox News: “I know with Ring in particular, if you delete a recording or you don’t want a recording, you don’t have a subscription. We didn’t store it. I know that because I built the systems with my team.”
Questions to Google
The question of how the FBI obtained this data is more obvious. If Google knew they had it, they probably would have turned it over, with the Guthrie family’s consent. If there were legal issues, the FBI could have issued a warrant and Google, seeking legal cover, would have handed it over once the processing was done. This could explain the 10 day delay.
The other possibility, however, is that it took 10 days to find it, as the FBI and Google searched for fragments of data and eventually discovered a backend system that was inadvertently storing Nest video data.
It may have been an old Nest system. Google bought the company in 2014 and for many years maintained separate Nest accounts and apps. The complete consolidation and removal of the Nest app has only happened in recent years. A residual portion of the Nest Cam Video’s data storage processes may not be cleared during the consolidation process.
Either way, it was just a fluke and the best lead authorities have to bring Guthrie home.
It would be helpful, however, if Google could explain more clearly 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 this and have yet to receive a response.
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