Slashdot Mirror
Google's Nest Buys Home Monitoring Camera Company Dropcam
rtoz writes: The popular home monitoring camera startup "Dropcam" will be acquired by Nest Labs, the maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors. The deal is worth $555 million in cash. Nest itself was purchased by Google just four months ago for $3.2 billion. Dropcam is a cloud-based, Wi-Fi video monitoring service, founded in 2009. It lets users place cameras throughout a home for live-viewing and recording. The cameras also include options for night vision and two-way talking with built-in microphones. Dropcam has never disclosed sales, but it is routinely the top-selling security camera on Amazon, and it recently branched into selling in retail stores like Apple and Best Buy. People concerned about the privacy implications of Google's acquisition of Nest may be further unsettled by Nest's purchase of a home surveillance company. Nest's founder Matt Rogers anticipated this issue, and insisted that there's no reason to worry. In his blog post, he says that data won't be shared with anyone, including Google, without a customer's permission. Nest has run into product challenges recently.
Could Google be any more transparent as a willing and eager participant of the surveillance state?
It'd be nice if they'd at least pretend to hide what they are doing, so as to not so blatently insult our intelligence.
Seriously... who in their right mind would involve Google in their home security?
Might as well just hire Big Brother.
Reminds me of the Mars Attacks aliens saying "We come in peace, we mean you no harm" right before they pew-pewed everyone.
You can, at least at times, trust people, especially ones you know well. A person's word may mean something.
You can, however, never trust companies unless you have a contractual relation with them (and, at times, not even then). A company's word is meaningless. Times change, people change, and what was impossible can become all too easy. The day will come, for example, when Mr Rogers is no longer at Dropcam / Nest / Google, and his successor may feel differently (or may be ordered to feel differently) about this.
This is without mentioning the elastic definitions of "permission" used at times on the Internet.
Google isn't the totalitarian regime.
It's one of the big players in the oligarchy which is taking over control of everything, but which is cozy with the nascent totalitarian regime which is forming all around us.
Once governments have access to ubiquitous information about everybody through government peering to bypass laws, and appropriation from corporations under secret order, and trade agreements which allow corporations to sue governments for lost revenue ... well, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, right?
Then you have totalitarian governments beholden to an oligarchy.
Sounds like some wacky fiction, don't it?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...he says that data won't be shared with anyone, including Google, without a customer's permission. ...
What he actually says is:
...Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission....
What Nest's privacy policy actually says is:
We pledge to: ... Ask your permission before sharing your Personally Identifiable Information with third parties for purposes other than to provide Nest’s services,
Notice how, we won't share your data with anyone without your permission in the article suddenly morphs into we won't share your personally identifiable information with anyone in the actual privacy policy statement?
What about the other non-personally identifiable data, like when my house is empty? Or how many people are in the house? etc, etc.
Here's a message to Google employees:
Find yourself a more meaningful job. Something in medicine, or in particle physics.
Or, just about anything outside of that shady advertisement business.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.