Google recovers “deleted” Nest video in high-profile abduction case
The suspect tries to cover the camera with a plant.
According to investigators’ statements, the video was “recovered from residual data located in the backend systems”. It is not known how long this data is kept or how easy it is for Google to access it. Some reports claim that it took Google several days to recover the data.
In large-scale enterprise storage solutions, “deleted” to the user does not always mean the data is gone. Data that is no longer needed is often compressed and overwritten only when necessary. In the meantime, it may be possible to recover the data. This is something a company like Google could decide to do itself, or it could be forced to carry out the recovery by court order. In the Guthrie case, it appears that Google voluntarily cooperated with the investigation, which makes sense. The release of video of the alleged perpetrator could be a major breakthrough as investigators seek the public’s help.
It’s not your cloud
It’s tempting to attribute malicious intent to Google’s video storage configuration. After all, this video expired after three hours, but here it is nine days later. This seems a bit suspicious at first glance, especially for a company that focuses so much on training AI models that feed on video.
We’ve previously asked Google to explain how it uses Nest to train AI models, and the company says it doesn’t incorporate user videos into the training data, but how you interact with the service and with your videos is fair game. “We may use your inputs, including prompts and comments, usage and results of interactions with AI Features to further research, tune and train Google’s generative models, machine learning technologies and related products and services,” Google said.
