Google says the camera's video and audio recording feature is disabled, does not stream anything while turned off

Nov 25, 2015 09:57 GMT  ·  By

ABI Research has inspected Google's Nest Cam and found that when users turn off the camera, only the LED lights shuts down, with other components continuing to run in the background.

Google's Nest Cam is a webcam utility that can either broadcast live feeds or store footage in the cloud. It is a modern, complex IoT device, which has been intensely promoted by Google in recent years.

Nest Cam continues to operate after being shut down

According to research carried out by the ABI Research group, whenever users turn off the camera, its electrical consumption drops only a few mA (miliAmpers), suggesting that only the LED has stopped working and that the camera's sensors and functions continue to operate as normal.

These functions include the ability to monitor surroundings by watching for movement or audio signals.

"In this case, the current drain only changed slightly when given the turn off command, reducing from 370mA to 340mA. Typically a shutdown or standby mode would reduce current by as much as 10 to 100 times," says Jim Mielke, Vice President of Teardowns at ABI Research.

"This means that even when a consumer thinks that he or she is successfully turning off this camera, the device is still running, which could potentially unleash a tidal wave of privacy concerns."

Google says it's not so

A Google spokesperson responded to ABI's accusations via The Security Ledger and clarified some of the research as a confusion.

The company spokesperson said the camera does continue to operate after being shut down, but its audio and video processing and recording features are indeed turned off.

The electrical consumption observed by ABI Research is because the camera is expecting to be turned on at any moment, and it lingers in an always-ready state.

While Google's explanation makes "technical" sense for a certified engineer like me, this also reminds me of another recent privacy scandal the company was involved in because of the "OK Google" voice search functionality that was secretly added to Linux versions of the Chromium browser.

To be fair, the ABI Research did not watch traffic to see if the camera was actually uploading anything to the cloud, which would have been useless nevertheless since the camera's traffic uses some of the hardest-to-crack encryption around.