Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping has led many to question how private their data actually is, as the FBI has managed to recover footage of a suspect from her doorbell camera, despite it being supposedly disabled.
Shared by FBI Director Kash Patel in a post on X, the images and video footage shows a masked individual approach her house, following power being completely disabled.
It shouldn’t surprise you to find out that your data is never truly safe or secure if it’s being uploaded and shared on the cloud, as while the convenience is certainly handy, it’s far from private.
As reported by Tom’s Guide, the situation in Guthrie’s case is a little more complicated though, as she appeared to have a 2nd Generation Google Nest Doorbell, which is both wireless – so it didn’t shut off when the house’s power was cut – and it has a small amount of on-device storage.
Following the Wi-Fi connection cutting out at her home, the device then switched to local storage, with three hours of event-based data also captured without a Nest Aware subscription.
This footage was then stored within Google’s servers despite being ‘deleted’ – as things don’t actually get removed entirely straight away – allowing officials to recover it from the backend before it was overwritten.
There’s nothing in this article indicating the Ring doorbell was “turned off”. The power was cut to the house, so the device switched to using its backup battery. That’s an advertised feature of the device, and isn’t unique to Ring or other burglar-alarm type devices.
Yeah, I’m all against this kind of surveillance, i.e the whole stuff about Ring cameras, but this is not the case.
It’s the product working as intended. If I ever had a reason to install security cameras to my home, I would expect them to work especially when someone is trying to cut out my power.
The FBI didn’t access anything.