Teardown shows Nest Cam is “always-on” even when you think it’s off

Alphabet's Nest Cam, the slimmer, sleeker successor to Dropcam. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

It turns out your home security camera may see more of your home than you thought it did. In a teardown of the Nest Cam, a team at ABI Research found that even when "off," the camera draws nearly the same amount of power as when it's fully powered on, meaning it's functional and running even when the indicator light claims otherwise.

Within the Nest Cam app, there is a "Camera On/Off" toggle, which many may think controls the camera's capture of video. However, the ABI team and Jim Mielke, vice president of teardowns at ABI Research, found that the home security camera doesn't draw much less power when it's "off." "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. This means that even when a consumer thinks that he or she is successfully turning off this camera, the device is still running."

This may be unsettling for those who own Nest Cams and believed they were totally shutting down the camera when they turned it off from within the app. However, Nest doesn't deny that this is true-a spokesperson for Nest Labs told the BBC in a statement, "When Nest Cam is turned off from the user interface (UI), it does not fully power down, as we expect the camera to be turned on again at any point in time."

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