FBI recovers Nest Cam footage without a subscription, raising privacy concerns

The FBI has released surveillance footage recovered from a Nest doorbell camera in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie. While the footage has certainly shed new light on the case and is an important piece of evidence, it’s raising privacy concerns among Nest camera and Google Home users about how the company stores their video recordings.

As the grainy video showing a masked individual approaching Guthrie’s front door was released on Tuesday, privacy advocates and users have been questioning how the footage was accessed by law enforcement.

According to the FBI, the clip was recovered from “residual data located in backend systems,” despite previous statements that there was no accessible video because the camera had been disconnected and Guthrie did not have an active subscription.

A Google Home Premium subscription is required for both event-based and 24/7 video recording, and since Guthrie didn’t have one, the footage the FBI was able to access shouldn’t have technically existed.

According to Google’s official documentation, its systems only retain three hours of event video previews without a subscription. To access recordings beyond that limit, users need to have a Google Home Premium Standard or Advanced subscription. However, this only applies to user-visible video history and is not the same as Google’s backend retention policies.

While the company does not publish specific technical details about how long raw camera data may exist on its servers, its legal and privacy documentation includes general statements about how it handles requests for information from governments and courts.

Nest’s privacy FAQs note that deleted data may linger in backups or be retained longer if required for legal reasons.

Meanwhile, according to the Nest Transparency Report and Google’s broader Terms of Service, the company may disclose user data in response to valid legal requests from government agencies, and says it reviews each request to ensure it complies with applicable laws and its internal policies.

So while Google’s publicly posted terms do not promise that recordings are held only for the short three-hour window for those without a Home Premium subscription, the company clearly reserves the right to retain data in accordance with its data retention practices. That said, it would be helpful if Google mentioned how long this data is retained for so users know what to expect.