[matt-attack]

Did anyone catch the recent development in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story?

For days it was explained that, while she had a Nest doorbell camera (which was stolen by the kidnapper) it was sadly useless because Nancy wasn’t paying for cloud storage. Just live video and notifications.

Well what do know happened today? The video of the kidnapper was magically produced by Google. I guess, even when you don’t pay for storage, they’re… you know…. Recording and saving the video anyway.

No one’s really bothered to point this out as they’re all just so excited that the video has turned up.

[maxehmookau]

Turns out you're not buying the storage and compute required to store your video. Google can afford that regardless of whether you pay.

They're licensing your own video back to you.

[pardon_me]

Do they just store everything? How long is that sustainable?

[bruckie]

Google doorbell cameras send clips to the cloud. They're accessible to users for 3 hours for free, and a month or two if you pay. While they become unavailable to users after 3 hours, it's unlikely that they're deleted immediately—partly for operational reasons (easier to clear out many clips periodically in a batch process, rather than individual clips one by one exactly when they expire), and partly because Google keeps a lot of data around for a short period (a week or two) to be able to debug systems. Even when data is requested to be deleted, it's often possible to recover it from off-site backups or soft-deleted data stores for a while. Google ensures that all user data is actually, irrecoverably deleted within 2 months after a deletion request (see https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention).

[zombot]

It has been pointed out in another HN comment thread, but ... surveillors gonna surveil, that's how they make money and accumulate power.