Google Nest camera video raises privacy questions

This is a misleading article including some quotes that wildly mischaracterize the original sources, while also including many lines of unrelated speculation that could be easily researched.

From the article:

> However, Google's privacy policy — a document that users often blindly agree to after purchasing a device — makes it clear that videos can be captured when a device is offline. “That means you may not see a visual indicator when your camera is sending the video footage to our servers," the policy states.

I looked this up because no link was provided [1]. The full quote is "Some models of our cameras support recording of video footage while offline. For these cameras, video footage will be uploaded when the camera goes back online after the video footage has been recorded. That means you may not see a visual indicator when your camera is sending the video footage to our servers. However, in those instances, a visual indicator would have been visible when the camera was actually recording the video footage."

So in this case, the author mangles "offline" (no Internet) with "recording".

Another quote:

> Google didn’t immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press about how the footage of the masked person was captured while the camera was apparently disconnected

The cameras was very clearly disconnected after the footage was recorded, because you can see the suspect begin to disconnect the camera.

There are many other examples of poor reporting in this article but I will leave it to the reader to find them.

[1] https://safety.google/intl/en_ca/products/nest/