is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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FBI Director Kash Patel said yesterday that investigators recovered footage from Savannah Guthrie’s mother’s doorbell camera using “residual data located in backend systems.” This claim has many home security camera users asking an uncomfortable question: Is your data really gone when you hit delete?
When Nancy Guthrie went missing, officials said she had a doorbell camera, but that it had been forcibly removed, and she did not have a subscription. This meant there were no videos stored in the cloud. Ten days later, the FBI released footage from the camera, which was revealed to be a Nest Doorbell, clearly showing the masked suspect.
This is a huge break in the case and proves the value of security cameras in solving crimes, even if their deterrent effect remains largely unproven. But it raises privacy concerns around how this supposedly “lost” footage was recovered.
How did Google retrieve footage that was deleted and that the user’s account didn’t have access to? Does this mean your deleted footage could be accessed by law enforcement? The answer to the second question, according to a forensic expert I spoke to, is technically yes. Deleted footage stored in the cloud can be recovered, but in this case, it was probably very difficult, and the resources to do so were likely made available only because of the case’s high profile.
I also reached out to Google, but it did not provide any additional information other than confirming that it is “assisting law enforcement with their investigations.”
To understand what likely happened, it helps to know how Google’s Nest cameras work, because they operate differently from most cameras on the market. Most of them only stream live footage unless you either pay for a subscription to the company’s cloud service or use local storage, such as a microSD card or a home hub.
“When you delete something from a server, it doesn’t get overwritten immediately” — Nick Barreiro
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