HACKER Q&A
📣 cameronh90

Any way to resolve Google Takeout errors?


I know this is sort of a weird question to post to HN, but I am getting absolutely nowhere with Google support and the issue is extremely urgent.

In summary, there was a suspected murder on my road and they haven't found the body. Police have asked for all of the footage from my Nest camera over a period of about a week, but the Google Home app doesn't allow any way to export footage unless it corresponds to a specific event.

Every time I try Google Takeout, it fails with the error: "Something went wrong and we couldn’t create a copy of your Google data. You can try to create a new export."

I have been bounced around like 4 different support teams within Google to ultimately be told the Nest team don't know how to support Google Takeout and that Google Takeout doesn't have a support team, and that Nest currently offers no way to export footage unless it's associated with an event.

Clearly choosing a Google product was an enormous mistake that I won't be making again, but does anyone know of any way to get this footage out? Each day I lose is one day closer to when it automatically deletes...

  👤 cowsup Accepted Answer ✓
Your best course of action is to tell your police agency what you told us, and have them take the steps towards giving Google a subpoena for the footage from your account for the period requested. That subpoena will make Google liable if they fail to deliver it prior to its deletion, and make this no longer your problem.
👤 nness
The cynic in me wants to say that you could be very concise with the language you choose to use when communicating with law enforcement. You are not obligated to hand-over the footage, but I can understand your willingness to assist. My concern is that, now that you know your footage may contain evidence, or if it does actually contain evidence (which you may not know is material to their investigation), then if they believe you are withholding it intentionally, you might be accused of evidence tampering.

I'd not volunteer any further information until they reach out to you again, then I would say something to the affect of "I am unable to provide this footage as, to the best of my knowledge, I do not know to extent to which it exists and do not know how to it can be retrieved. This information is with Google."