How did authorities retrieve seemingly 'inaccessible' video doorbell cam footage in the Nancy Guthrie case, and the questions it raises about your Nest Cam account

• Google and the FBI have released Nest Video Doorbell footage of Nancy Guthrie's apparent abductor
• Ordinarily, video footage is deleted without a subscription to Nest Aware or Google Home Premium
• Nancy Guthrie was not a subscriber, which raises questions on how Google obtained the footage

The miraculous discovery of Nest Video Doorbell footage of Nancy Guthrie's apparent abductor tampering with the doorbell in the hours before she was taken offered a significant lead and a glimmer of hope that this case could be solved quickly and Guthrie might soon be returned to her family.

However, questions remain about where the video came from and how it even exists. Nancy Guthrie, The Today Show Host's Savannah Guthrie's mother, was not a Nest Aware Subscriber according to Fortune. A $10-a-month subscription gets you access to 30 days of video history (which lives in Google's cloud-based servers).

Without a Nest Aware (the name for the legacy subscription service on older Nest devices) or Google Home Premium account, the situation is quite different.

According to Google's support pages:

"If you don’t have a subscription:

Your camera saves up to 6 hours of activity before it expires and is deleted.

Nest Camera Indoor (wired, 3rd gen), Nest Camera Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen) and Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) offer up to 6 hours of Event Video Previews with up to 10 second clips.

Older cameras offer up to 3 hours of event-based with clips up to 5 minutes."

That six-hour window is important because, according to the timeline, nine hours passed between the Nest Camera being disconnected and removed from the home and the Guthrie family realizing the 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie was missing.

When the FBI released the video 10 days after Guthrie's abduction, the law-enforcement agency wrote in a post: "The FBI and Pima County Sheriff’s Department have been working closely with our private sector partners to continue to recover any images or video footage from Nancy Guthrie's home that may have been lost, corrupted, or inaccessible due to a variety of factors, including the removal of recording devices. The video was recovered from residual data located in backend systems."

I added the boldface to highlight the relevant portions. It's hard to read that any other way than as Nest Video Doorbell cam data was found in the cloud, and with the help of Google.

Again, this is net good news. There's a wealth of information investigators can grab from that footage. However, the existence of that footage does raise some questions about what video data Google is storing, even for those who are not paying for Google Home Premium or Nest Aware.

It's not like someone at Google just kept digging through closets, rummaging through shelves and stacks, and stumbled on this video data. There is a process for these things, an automated system.

How it works

I have an aging Nest Outdoor Cam on the back of my home. Through it and on the Google Home app, I can see a live video feed and short clips triggered by sound and motion. I do not have a Premium account, and so the video clips are deleted on a rolling basis and are always gone within a few hours.

Some I've talked to on social media point to Google's Process for deleting videos upon request. But this assumes that Google is storing them and that you have an Aware or Premium account. Without such an account, you are telling Google, "Do not store my video. Do not store my data."

Yes, there's a bit of data stored for a temporary period of time, but anything beyond that would be outside the agreement between Google and its customers. Google can't store your data without permission.

This, by the way, is also how it works with Nest's chief video doorbell competitor Ring. When asked about the case, Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff told Fox News, "I do know with Ring specifically, if you delete a recording or if you don't want a recording, you don't have a subscription. We do not have it stored. I know that because I built the systems with my team."

Questions for Google

The question of how the FBI obtained the data is more obvious. If Google knew they had it, they likely, with consent from the Guthrie family, handed it over. If there were legal concerns, the FBI might've issued a warrant, and Google, seeking legal cover, would've handed it over after that was processed. That might account for the 10-day delay.

The other possibility, though, is that it took 10 days to find because the FBI and Google went looking for any shreds of data and finally discovered a backend system that was inadvertently storing Nest video data.

Perhaps it was a legacy Nest system. Google bought the company in 2014 and, for many years after, maintained separate Nest accounts and apps. The full consolidation and removal of the Nest app only happened in recent years. A vestigial bit of Nest Cam Video data storage processes not mopped up in the consolidation process is possible.

In either case, this is just a stroke of good luck and the best lead the authorities have for bringing Guthrie back home.

It would be helpful, however, for Google to offer some clarity on how this happened and what it actually means for the rest of us who own Nest Cams and do not have an Aware or Premium subscription.

I've sent multiple emails to Google on the matter and have yet to receive a response.

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