There was an article the other day called something like "How is Google helping the investigation?"

It said she didn't have a cloud subscription, but that there are data pipelines that make these sort of devices work. (Imagine there's a thumbnail of the video in the product somewhere, so there's a pipeline that takes a video stream and generates thumbnails.)

According to the article, it was a matter of having someone figure out which pipelines her videos might have touched, and then go looking to see if there were any ephemeral artifacts that hadn't been lost yet.

saw this cnn article that discusses a similar theory. it was unclear to me whether the source of the article is purely speculation.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/tech/google-video-nancy-guthr... and archived at https://archive.ph/oZyRM

The guy writing a thumbnail pipeline isn't getting petabytes (exabytes?) of storage to cache all videos from the past week in their entirety. If this quantity of data is being stored, it's being stored deliberately and at significant cost.