Investigators pulled video from ‘residual data’ in Google’s systems — here’s how that was possible and what it means for your privacy.
They’re going to lengths to make it sound like oh there was some cached server they found after intensive searching that hadn’t yet been updated or some such nonsense, but reality is is that Google is part of the dystopian constant surveillance present we now live in and likely they save ever little bit of video and information they can get their grubby blood stained hands on and use it for ai processing, government contracts, or you know, to jerk off to in their free time.
Fuck I really need to get off my ass and degoogled.
While this case shows recovery is technically possible, it also shows it’s rare, resource-intensive, and reserved for extraordinary circumstances.
How does this show “it’s rare, resource-intensive, and reserved for extraordinary circumstances” when that’s entirely based upon the word of the people doing it in secret?
“Google is notoriously uncooperative with law enforcement; they will comply with search warrants, but in the least helpful way possible and they will fight it,” he says.
Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE
“Google has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account,” it read. The email advised Jon that the “legal process” was an administrative subpoena, issued by DHS. Soon, government agents would arrive at his home.
The subpoena wasn’t approved by any judge, and it didn’t require probable cause. Google gave Jon just seven days to challenge it in federal court — not nearly enough time for someone without a crack team of lawyers on retainer. Even more maddeningly, neither Google nor DHS had sent him a copy of the subpoena itself, leaving Jon and his attorney in the dark.
This article reeks of whitewashing for the government and tech industry.
Saying google is uncooperative with law enforcement is like saying Donald Trump tried his very hardest not to rape children.
They are desperate to make it look like the google cameras aren’t recording and saving data 24/7 regardless of whether you have an account or not.
It sure does. It’s an article about your deleted data being accessible by Google engineers then spends the rest of the article backtracking.
The fact that giant companies keep your data and don’t delete it when you tell them to has been true since the beginning of social media. Your things are not deleted, they’re simply marked as deleted so you don’t see them. The actual binary data never goes anywhere.
The rule of thumb is that if the data leaves your possession then assume someone has a copy of it. If it is encrypted and you don’t control your keys then it isn’t encrypted. (See: Bitlocker keys and Microsoft)
This article is on the verge of making sense. The hell kind of nonsense is this. Files can be recovered but don’t worry not yours unless something happens.
IDK this just looks like ICE kidnapped her. Has anyone checked the concentration camps?
From the article:
Nest cameras, by contrast, can send clips to Google’s servers even without a paid subscription. Google offers a small amount of free cloud storage — older models store clips up to five minutes long for three hours; the latest models store 10-second clips for six hours. That means some footage is uploaded and stored, at least temporarily, whether you pay or not.
According to Nick Barreiro, chief forensic analyst with Principle Forensics, deleting footage from the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immediately gone. “When you delete something from a server, it doesn’t get overwritten immediately — the file system is just told to ignore this data, and this space is now available to be used. But if no new data is written over it, it’s still going to be there, even though you can’t see it.”
This is more or less how local storage works as well. The creator of BleachBit, a file cleaning tool made famous for being present on Hillary Clinton’s email servers, has some great insights in their documentation about the methods for destroying data on hard drives. As it turns out, data “deletion” is just a series of operations on your hard disk like any other, and retrieval depends on the methods used - de-indexing, metadata and file structure removal, and overwriting to name a few.
Once, I accidentally formatted the wrong drive in Windows and it ended up being my 20TB platter (oops). I was able to recover 99% of the files on the drive with some free recovery software just because I disconnected and stopped using the drive immediately. The only files lost were large ones partially overwritten by the new blank file system created when I formatted the drive. Windows had only deleted the file system indexing the drive, and all of the file data and metadata was intact, waiting to be randomly overwritten. I had to string together four cheap failing 4TB SATA drives I bought used on Amazon, but it worked.
The point is, if I could do this as an amateur, and storage technology operating on the same principals is in use at enterprise scale, what are the lengths that the likes of the FBI and Google are willing to go to recover old data that has been “deleted”? I’m frankly surprised that Google does not overwrite their discarded data, and it’s probably for reasons like this, beyond the additional processing time it would take. Given their vast resources and storage capacity, it could be some time before “deleted” data is at least partially overwritten, if ever.
If you ever have data that you absolutely need destroyed, overwrite the entire drive with random data more than once, then physically shred the drive completely. And never connect your devices to a cloud storage service. It’s the only way to be sure.
I was under the impression that Google just didn’t delete data — ever. Like, it’s way more valuable compared to the cost of the disk.
I’ve never understood the overwrite more than once instruction. If the entire drive is overwritten how in the world do you pull back data out from an overwrite?
Flipping the bits on a magnetic medium back and forth doesn’t always flip them entirely. Using more sensitive equipment to read back the bits can see the faint hints of what the bits used to be, which is why multiple overwrites with random information is the only way to be sure (and even then, there are advanced techniques that try to see past all that noise. The more you overwrite, the less sure any of these techniques are to work.
Magnetic platter drives still have the highest storage density per dollar and so they are still heavily in use. Theoretically, overwritten data can be recovered from them by analyzing the magnetic fields directly from the platter. However, this is extremely time and money intensive and requires specialized equipment and expertise. Overwriting a partition multiple times severely complicates this process just by performing multiple overwrites.
Realistically, overwriting once with random data is enough, especially if the drive is to be physically destroyed. You can also use a powerful magnet (top end neodymium in direct contact) to scramble the delicate magnetic fields that encode the data on the platter, but at that point you may as well shred the drive anyways.
SSDs are a fundamentally different storage paradigm that make this kind of recovery essentially impossible. Due to the limitations of NAND memory, data can be written to blocks inaccessible except at the hardware level. To make SSDs secure, modern drives usually implement processes (TRIM) that erase blocks marked for deletion. Or, all data written to the drive is encrypted by onboard hardware (SED), and “erasing” the drive simply deletes the encryption keys.
A whole new generation learns what “marked as deleted” means.
This is a pretty decent article and answered some of the exact questions I had when I heard about the recovered video.
or a cloud service that offers end-to-end encryption, which means not even the provider can access your footage.
That’s not what “end-to-end encryption” means. End-to-end encryption means only the sender and receiver have the ability to decrypt the message. The definition the author provided would be a match for “Zero-Knowledge Encryption” instead.
What’s the old adage? If it’s on the internet it is there forever? except when nintendo IP lawyers or dmca douchebags are involved
Even local files still “exist” when you delete them. Usually the filesystem just marks those blocks as reusable since overwriting the data would take a lot longer.
Really with an SSD this makes extra sense. Not only would over writing the data immediately take some time but would also use up the limited write cycles faster.
It’s on the internet forever, but whatever the regular user needs is lost behind poor content indexing and incompetent search functions
