Users only get three hours of free Nest video storage, but Google can retrieve videos much later.
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Google recovers “deleted” Nest video in high-profile abduction case
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If this was local PD asking about someone not high profile, I guarantee google would have just shrugged it's shoulders.
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Well, that's that. I'm going fully over to Ubiquiti since I own my data. It can still be subpoenaed by the courts, but at least I'm in control of my own data retention.
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Did that myself about 18 months ago. My only regret: not making that move sooner.
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I don't think there was anything nefarious going on here, clearly google didn't have intimidate access to footage. Which likely means they went to a fairly great effort to hunt down the physical drive that it was originally stored on in a data center so that the footage could be manually recovered before it was overwritten.
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It google has deleted more than a single gigabyte of user data in the last ten years, I will be shocked beyond all definitions of the word. Every single bit they have is an edge against their competition when it comes to training data for their disgusting llms.
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What solutions do fellow Arsians recommend for WiFi cameras connecting back to local storage? I want to run maybe 3 Wifi camera, possibly solar powered, connecting back to a computer running some kind of software to grab the video and archive it. I would be willing to pay for the software, but open source solutions are nice too.
The cameras don't need to be sold as solar powered as I can figure out how to solar power any camera with a DC input.
I just want to buy the equipment once and own it forever. I abhor the subscription model.
The cameras don't need to be sold as solar powered as I can figure out how to solar power any camera with a DC input.
I just want to buy the equipment once and own it forever. I abhor the subscription model.
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My needs are modest, so I set up an entry level UniFI camera doorbell combo.
$99 Doorbell Lite, hardwired with power over ethernet.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/products/uvc-doorbell-lite
NVR Instant with an 8 gig drive.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-nvr/collections/unvr-instant
Have it hooked into my Apple ecosystem with Scrypted running on my Unraid server. Doorbell rings my Homepod Mini, camera shows up on my AppleTV, all recordings local, cannot be WiFi jammed, not expensive.
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Your video is not your video. Just look at how creepy and disturbing Ring's stuporbowl ad was.
OTOH, Masked agent abducting and disappearing person. Obviously ICE took her.
OTOH, Masked agent abducting and disappearing person. Obviously ICE took her.
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What I just suggested above has WiFi options, I just prefer POE hardwiring. Less network issues and vulnerabilities, no batteries. But you don't have to run cable to make it all work.
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I think this is because the article is filed only in the non-standard "google" category, instead of "gadgets" or "policy" that you find in the top menu. There are more articles in "google", but most are also in one of the main categories and so get the corresponding icon.
See also this article in the "apple" category:
https://meincmagazine.com/apple/2026/...-powered-wearable-pin-device-as-soon-as-2027/
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Are you sure about that? Seems a bit small. Yes, I am being a smartass.
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I use blue iris. It works well. I also block each camera at the router level from accessing the wan in case my cheapo cameras have some sort of backdoor access. Blue iris then gets access and I can view them through the web server. The cameras do not get direct access to the Internet. It supports just about any IP cam out there.
Also supports emails and texting as well as push notifications through their app.
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So, honest question: What has alphabet done to earn the benefit of the doubt you are giving them?
Again, just an honest question.
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Google is able to retrieve your data that they say is not available to you. Ergo, it's not really deleted.
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I have a fairly high-res system with a local NVR combined with an intercom/access control system.
The horror part? It's all HIKVision hardware and even uses their US based server to route video and calls to my phone. Am I worried the Chinese government has access to my cameras? Not any more concerned than I would be if any other company or government had the same access. And given that I'm a libtard, I probably feel more comfortable than if our current administration had any way to access such.
The horror part? It's all HIKVision hardware and even uses their US based server to route video and calls to my phone. Am I worried the Chinese government has access to my cameras? Not any more concerned than I would be if any other company or government had the same access. And given that I'm a libtard, I probably feel more comfortable than if our current administration had any way to access such.
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The software you are looking for is either Blue Iris or Frigate. Both operate locally, with no subscription and you can use just about any camera. You'll need to do a little reading and/or youtube academy for hardware selection and initial setup. Blue Iris is the more established way to go, Frigate offers some neat advanced local AI detection features.
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I also want my own security system but I’m a relatively new homeowner. Don’t these cameras need to be wired? I’m so daunted by having to run cables - data and power (may be solved by PoE) but it seems like it’ll cost be 2-3K for an electrician to do this. Plus equipment and all, isn’t it like 5K to get it all done? I’m not the best when it comes to electricity, having shocked myself a couple of times lol. I was thinking of getting the Reolink from Costco.
I do want to move over but I chose ecobee because the project seems daunting. Would love to have my own setup though.
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Correct. We have a couple extra categories that aren't usually directly exposed so people can use them for their filtering. If something is filed under one of them as the main category they get a generic icon.
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I doubt it involved physical drive location and recovery. These video feeds probably have to go through a few steps before they get to their final locations that have the short lifecycle. For example, the segments may be ran through a packager or transcoder hosted in Google's cloud, which might make use of S3 buckets to store and process different versions or copies of the video files at different stages in the workload. So more likely (but less awesome), they found a service that retained the files long enough to recover them from object storage before they were automatically deleted via a retention policy. Many companies have long retention policies (up to 6 months) for even short-lived public-facing assets, for legal reasons such as this unfortunate situation.
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This would be my first guess too.
Google probably has an enormous storage area somewhere where they write all this data temporarily, and for those who pay for it, it gets copied from there to more long term storage. For those that don't pay they "delete" the data with a typical file level delete. That is, the file sits unchanged on the storage media but its entry is removed from the relevant directory. So they were able to recover this information because that area of the media had not yet been overwritten. Also probably the files contain headers with enough info to determine where and when it was made. There is a substantial chance that this storage is organized by user, so when the attacker destroyed the camera it prevented newer recordings from overwriting the last ones which were made.
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This is because Google never deletes any data even when it says it does. Google's entire business model relies on how much more data it retained today than yesterday.
My employer locks user acount access after 30 days when an employee separates from the org; that is also the message that is passed onto the internal management across the business. So for all intents and purposes that is what all/most employees know.
The reality is that all user data is stored in a Microsoft backend indefinitely and a small handful of us can in fact retrieve data stored long after the 30 day cap we proclaim to employees.
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For the suggestions of Ubiquiti, if anyone has some internal morality clauses with their money you'd probably want to know about them skirting sanctions to sell to the Russian military, providing key comm tech used in their drone strikes on Ukraine:
https://hntrbrk.com/ubiquiti/
As for the article, not surprising? Kinda wonder about all the fine print, if it actually says flat out "deleted" or leaves wiggle room, whether it's like a deletion process that can take a while (like marked as deleted but archived/held in cold storage until overwritten or whatever) or deleted as far as human access goes *but not really and still able to be used for AI training, or whatever other scenarios.
https://hntrbrk.com/ubiquiti/
As for the article, not surprising? Kinda wonder about all the fine print, if it actually says flat out "deleted" or leaves wiggle room, whether it's like a deletion process that can take a while (like marked as deleted but archived/held in cold storage until overwritten or whatever) or deleted as far as human access goes *but not really and still able to be used for AI training, or whatever other scenarios.
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Blue Iris is what I am looking for!
My use case is mainly my long driveway. I would like to keep track of people/vehicles coming and going. I would setup the network exactly as jimrose describes.
Hardware is my forte, just needed a little help with the software end of things.
Thanks.
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The police in my country has the capability to follow suspects for hours jumping from camera to camera. I have seen them do it on television. Even changing the getaway vehicle doesn't help anymore.
It is not really a problem as long as you don't elect religious fanatics or fascists...
It is not really a problem as long as you don't elect religious fanatics or fascists...
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Another vote for the Unifi system. I've got a UDM Pro, which is a combination NVR, gateway, firewall, and network controller. The whole thing really works beautifully. If you want it to just be plug-and-play, it will be, but if you want to nerd out and create VLANs and separate SSIDs and all of that, you can do that, too.
The only real downside is basically the same as the upside: the video is all stored locally. If someone breaks into my house and smashes my UDMP with a hammer, then the video is toast.
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Well crap. Maybe I should finally figure out how to get Unifi cameras working for my apartment. But I can't drill into the walls... 
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Do you actually have a source for this? Sure, Google isn't a saintly company, but the idea that they and Microsoft are just straight-up lying about deleting data seems questionable to me. Occam's Razor here will tell you that their systems just hadn't gotten around to wiping that video yet and it was recovered the same way that "undelete" commands and forensics can recover deleted files.
Google has plenty of data to train their LLMs and tailor ads. They wouldn't intentionally take the risk of straight up fraudulent representation, especially with something like video that really could get them in hot water. Same for MS and Apple. And there are enough disgruntled employees that we'd probably have heard about this kind of thing; it's hard to maintain a giant conspiracy with thousands of people running around who have admin access to these systems.
Now, some random Chinese vendor like Eufy . . . probably a different story. And I'd say that given Facebook's history of outright lying and the fact that the CEO is a straight up sociopath probably would make me skeptical of any promises like this from them, too. But Google is run by professional people, and so is MS and Apple whether you like them or not.
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Yeah, this is pretty normal. I was an engineer at Google for a decade or so, ending ~11 years ago. I was in Adwords, mostly behind the scenes stuff like data persistence and ad quality / safety rather than directly user-facing stuff. Still, we had tons of advertiser data and some user data (click logs and the like). PII would get cleaned up promptly because there are legal requirements. But for other stuff where there wasn't a law or a TOS, we might delete the references to the data but leave the underlying files lying around until some sort of periodic garbage collection happened. This was just for efficiency, not from any nefarious intent.
I'm not sure how this would affect any particular third-party data in Google Cloud. It totally depends on the TOS and security guarantees the customer is paying for.
What I'm guessing happened here (and it's just a guess) is that someone at Google dug through the Nest logs to see if there were any "events" at the Guthrie house. Then they went out to the filesystem (or Spanner, Bigtable, whatever new hotness they use now.) and were lucky to find that those files / entries hasn't been deleted yet. At that point some messing about on the command line would get them the data.
Addressing the "Google sells all your data" crowd: They really don't — or didn't a decade ago anyway. The attitude was that they're better than anyone else in the world at extracting values from the data, eg by using it to decide which adds to show when. So they thought they could make more money by hanging on to data instead of trying to sell it.
Whether that is any better than selling the data is an exercise for the reader.
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As a Dream Machine convert, I can confidently say that all you have to lose is fractions of pennies a day in disk space. Truly the best solution, with near complete owner agency.
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I'm using 2 blink battery powered cameras with their station and all the clips are stored on the stations micro sd 256gb. I've had them running in my alley for 760 days (lots of movement, trucks, birds, people). I've only replaced the AA lithium batteries once so far. This works for me, no power and good movement detection for the clips.
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