I'll make you a gentleman's bet that Facebook is thinking about eye tracking.

Google acquiring Nest has a plan: collect data on electricity usage, presence in house and have a basis for inferring what people are doing generally all day.

Could they do eye tracking with a phone's camera easily enough?

Samsung do I think, for their scrolling feature.

They could make VR services for person-to-person communication. Be in the room with someone a thousand miles away, rake in cash for in-world ads and purchases... it could essentially become a future iteration of facebook (for when VR catches up to mobile).

If nothing else they could follow the original plan and sell a standalone rift for a profit.

When you hear it that way, it sounds like the spawn of the VR world called Society seen in the movie Gamer.

How would you do face-to-face if both of you have giant goggles strapped to your faces?

That's made me laugh, thanks!

"You look really good today!"

"Thanks! Nice goggles!"

At least if Google bought them, they would have had Google Goggles. The mind boggles at the goggles, it gives me the giggles.

You still wouldn't be able to hug your counterpart.

So what? Now they will have Facebook Faces? creepy....

> Google acquiring Nest has a plan: collect data on electricity usage, presence in house and have a basis for inferring what people are doing generally all day.

OK I'll bite. What does google do with this data? I don't see anyway this helps their ad business.

It's really not that simple with google, I think. I truly can't imagine that a company with the size, reach, and leadership of google has the unambitious and unsexy ultimate goal of selling more ads.

Sure, it's one of the larger objectives of the company simply because it's their big money maker, but I think it would be phenomenally short-sighted of the decision makers at google to focus and rely on ads long-term.

I don't think the decision makers in the company spend their time thinking up ways to sell ads. Considering the massive amount of information and power they have, there must be more to it.

In the end I think it's really still what they said in their mission statement: "Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Sure, their own survival is an 'automatic' goal, and ads serve that purpose. And sure, it seems that ideologically google doesn't care about privacy too much (which makes sense if you want to organize the world's information). And those are all reasons to be critical of google's operations.

Acquiring Nest seems to have no benefit at all in the context of ads; I can't think of any way to shoehorn ads into a thermostat in any effective way.

Rather, they are now getting useful information on people's behavior in their house, not to mention a team that has made a successful real product. That acquisition does not make sense in light of ads, but it does in light of google's goals, just as their mapping, street view, and glass serve this same purpose: more information to use in a myriad of (profitable) ways.

They see you're up when most people are asleep, assume you work night shifts, and then advertise sleep aids and the local 24 hour gym.

There's very little personal info that's not valuable to someone, somewhere.

I would throw them off scent by boosting the heating at night and sleeping with the lights on.