As someone who is 16 months into being a first-year parent, I'm going to say that if you are about to be first time parents, you are about to discover the answer to a whole lot of "I don't see see why" questions, and "why we wouldn't want to have to actively refuse rather than actively allow anyone, even our parents, to see what is going on in the nursery at will" is pretty likely to feature prominently on that list.
A detailed technical guide to the security features of this device would almost be enough for me to buy one if their methodology was good and their security sound.
Even if it cost them 10% in sales they are still saving money since having solid security would cost way more and take more of the little time they have to bring the product to market.
Aside: I also realize that Apple or Amazon may pillage my data just the same, but I feel like they make money by actually selling things vs. selling my personal info and thus their incentives are skewed towards chasing things I'm generally more okay with.
Curious why you differentiate between Amazon and Google. Maybe you pesonally don't shop there, but they are the world's largest (maybe Ali in China is bigger by volume) online retailer and they have a metric shit ton of what advertisers really want, the data on shopping preferences.
In terms of using it when your child is older, I'm not sure you'll be using the same device 3+ years from now.
My wife and I are about to be first-time parents and for us, this is a pretty exciting product for parents compared to the other devices out there in this space.
For the "drop in" feature specifically, my plan is to leave one Show in the nursery and one for my parents. They like to call us a lot, and with this device, I should be able to whitelist their device and let them "drop in" on the nursery and whatever we're doing at the time. I think a lot of people have a problem with the privacy aspect, but for us, I don't see why we would have a problem with my parents seeing the nursery at any given time, esp with the 10sec window to decline. And then once the baby is older, we'd move the Show to the kitchen for music, looking up recipes, etc.
I think there's going to be a lot of parents looking hard at this device. The intro video Amazon made is mostly for this use case as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQqxCeHhmeU