Smart home security cameras are usually meant to make your home more secure, not less, but that isn’t always the case. In what is sadly becoming a familiar story, someone over on Reddit claims to have received a short alert video from a random stranger’s Nest Cam.
If that brings on some déjà vu, it’s not just you. Almost precisely the same thing happened earlier this year to some Xiaomi Mijia cameras linked to the Google Assistant.
Details at this point are sparse. The user’s report claims the feed simply popped up on their display while sitting at the kitchen table, depicting an unfamiliar “Front Door” Nest camera. A stranger walked up to the door — presumably ringing the bell, given the countdown — and walked away just before the video below was recorded:
Image via Reddit.
Not much else about what happened is known right now, though the user claims that the neighborhood depicted in the video is definitely not his, which may rule out a local issue like an open Wi-Fi access point. A Google representative reached out to the affected Nest Hub owner, and details regarding the device’s provenance, time zone, and firmware/build info were provided to the company. We spoke to the Nest Hub owner, and they confirmed being told that engineers were on the case.
We separately reached out to Google for more information and were told the company is aware of the reports and looking into it. We expect to hear more later, but other details weren’t forthcoming at the time of writing
While it’s too early to draw any conclusions, and there are plenty of potential explanations for what happened, it’s still concerning hearing about things like this.
