Privacy concerns may have factored into it, but I suspect it was more to do with signaling the natural relationship between home automation devices, much like the way they positioned it so that "YouTube" (video streaming service) is acquiring Twitch (video streaming service).
Dropcam runs on AWS [1], "ingest[ing] more video per minute than YouTube" [2] into S3. Presumably the cost savings from switching to Google infrastructure will be compelling enough to change that. They'll probably torture the semantics and say "the data is there but Google can't access it".
Naturally what what they mean is not, this data will never exist on a computer/network owned by Google. What they mean is we aren't going use video from your security camera for general Google projects, like street view, collecting large amounts of speech databases for voice recognition, figuring out what products you and enjoy using and tailoring advertising to fit that, or tracking epidemics in real time by monitoring how many people in your house are sick.
For now, maybe. But Google owns Nest, so Google owns the data, and one day they can easily decide to start looking at it. So either you don't care that Google can look at that data (which is fine), or you do care, and these kind of assurances should mean little to nothing.
Google has acquired Nest... so now Google has also acquired Dropcam
Nest wasn't an acquihire or an assimilation, but was always stated as a separately operating organization. As such, it makes total sense that Nest acquisitions are held as being under Nest.
If HBO acquired a show or a studio, you don't say that Time Warner acquired it. If NBC acquires a property, you don't say that Comcast acquired it. These arms lengths subsidiaries are at arms length for good logistical reasons.
Further it's interesting how much a privacy concern people think Google is on HN, yet in normal life the amount of trust in Google is...actually shocking. I mean Google makes no bones about telling you, endlessly, how much they know about you. They don't hide it.
>Further it's interesting how much a privacy concern people think Google is on HN, yet in normal life the amount of trust in Google is...actually shocking. I mean Google makes no bones about telling you, endlessly, how much they know about you. They don't hide it.
Interesting. We must hear from different companies. The Google I hear from only says they just know a few basic things like showing an interest in technology and possibly being a male. Google excessively downplays the amount of actual information they have access to via social connections, mobile device usage, search history, email contents, etc.
Only Google Now is entirely and absolutely built upon a pervasive trawling of everything you do, and users love them for it. It knows every location you regularly visit (categorizing them into locations like work and home), and will give you updated traffic and routing guidance. It knows every flight you take, package you have coming, sports team you ever searched up, things you've recently watched or searched, and on and on. If you have multiple devices, it happily and openly shares all of this data between devices.
They hardly downplay anything given that this is the entire foundation of an entire, front of market product.
