Nest is acquiring Dropcam

Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by georgemcbay on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:36PM (#7923648)

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).

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by gress on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:15PM (#7923573)

Yup, the want to avoid the headline: "Google buys network of in-home cameras."

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by privong on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:21PM (#7923601)

They did make a point of explicitly saying none of the data is shared with Google. But, yeah, probably best for fit PR to differentiate.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by dbarlett on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:29PM (#7923633)

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".

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropcam/

[2] http://gigaom.com/2013/07/31/dropcam-gets-30m-for-expansion-...

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by lotu on Friday June 20, 2014 @09:00PM (#7923722)

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.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by gress on Friday June 20, 2014 @09:19PM (#7923779)

Or providing video to law enforcement on demand.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by hueving on Saturday June 21, 2014 @04:25AM (#7924483)

Well of course they will do that. Any company in the US is compelled to follow the law and give up any information they can possibly access.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by pgeorgi on Saturday June 21, 2014 @02:59AM (#7924396)

I guess it doesn't make much of a difference if Google or Amazon is doing it.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by gress on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @07:47PM (#7941426)

Amazon isn't in a position to build a law enforcement portal to this service. Google now is.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by npizzolato on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:45PM (#7923673)

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.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by gress on Friday June 20, 2014 @09:13PM (#7923760)

Google has demonstrated zero hesitation about changing privacy policies when it suits them.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by esbonsa on Friday June 20, 2014 @10:24PM (#7923910)

Hopefully it will make some noise if it changes at the next revision of the privacy policy...

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by joliv on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:19PM (#7923591)

To give us commenters the "Nest"ing doll softball of a pun.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by personZ on Friday June 20, 2014 @08:59PM (#7923720)

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.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by hueving on Saturday June 21, 2014 @04:22AM (#7924481)

>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.

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Re:Nest is acquiring Dropcam by personZ on Saturday June 21, 2014 @08:02AM (#7924782)

>Google excessively downplays

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.

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