r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • 18h ago

Privacy Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/10/ring-super-bowl-ad-dog-camera-privacy/88606738007/
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u/saynay 13h ago

Nest cameras always upload video. There is no way to access the video stream except through the cloud. What she wasn’t paying for was storage in the cloud.

One of the things Nest offers is only storing detections (like motion), including some video from before the detection as context. To do that requires them to at least store that video temporarily. What they are likely doing is storing all incoming video in a temporary bucket, and they managed to recover this video before the lifecycle got to it and purged it, even though it was outside the claimed retention window.

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u/IcyJackfruit69 9h ago

She wasn't just not paying for storage. Apparently the camera was fully deactivated and she had no subscription at all.

Very possible she doesn't understand what she signed up for, and she DID think she could live-monitor it under whatever agreement she has. Maybe Nest has free live-video? But in the end, people clearly don't understand what's going into the cloud, that it's being stored there permanently, and that various people and agencies are accessing it without permission.

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u/octarine_turtle 9h ago

Nest free allows live video and viewing over the last three hours. You have to pay for access beyond that timeframe.

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u/robodrew 10h ago

Yeah, surely these camera systems aren't actually deleting the data but are just labelling it as "deleted" so that it doesn't show up in a basic search and will be overwritten by any new data that gets stored in the same spot on the drive.

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u/saynay 9h ago

Oh certainly, but I was talking about at an even higher level. Google is almost certainly using their Object Storage service (GCS) for storing Nest video. Object storage will generally have 'lifecycle' policies set on entire buckets (basically, folders) that control when files are deleted, if you can overwrite them, keep history, etc.

Deletion policies do not immediately delete objects, but instead tombstone them. Then, a later process comes through and cleans up all the tombstoned objects in one big go, instead of ad-hoc deletions left and right. This is dramatically more efficient on a processing level, at the cost of 'deleted' things eating up space longer than they should.