So Google bought my thermostat. Well, not my thermostat specifically, but the company that made it, for $3.2 billion in cash, announced Monday. I've been sitting on this one for a few days trying to figure out how I actually feel about it, because my gut reaction and my brain reaction are not lining up.
For anyone who missed it: Nest Labs, the company behind the Nest Learning Thermostat and the Nest Protect smoke detector, is now a Google company. Tony Fadell, who ran the team, used to run the iPod division at Apple back in the day, and it shows in the product, the thermostat on my hallway wall looks like something out of an Apple Store display case, not the beige plastic dial thing it replaced. I bought mine in December 2012 for $249, which felt like an insane amount of money to spend on a thermostat at the time, and I remember my dad laughing at me over the phone when I told him.
Here's the thing though. It works. It learns your schedule after a week or two and starts adjusting the temperature before you even touch it, and Nest's own numbers claimed something like 20% savings on the heating bill, though I never bothered to actually verify that against my own gas bills because doing that kind of math on a Tuesday night sounded exhausting. My apartment building has radiators from what feels like the Truman administration so the thermostat still reads out 72 even when the living room is objectively 65 degrees and I'm wearing a hoodie indoors, but that's a building problem, not a Nest problem.
So that's the good part. Now the part that's been bugging me.
Google already knows what I search for, what I email about, where my phone thinks I am most nights, and now, if they want it, they can know when I'm home, when I'm asleep, and how I like my house heated when nobody's watching. None of that is illegal or even unusual for a company to want, Nest was already collecting this stuff, it's how the "learning" part of the learning thermostat works, but there's a difference between a small startup in Palo Alto having your temperature habits and a company that also runs your email, your search history, and increasingly your phone's operating system having them too. Nest put out a statement saying customer data won't get folded into the rest of Google's stuff without permission. I want to believe that. I also remember when Google said a bunch of other things over the years that didn't hold up great in hindsight, so forgive me for filing this under "we'll see."
There's also a more boring, practical worry, which is what happens to the actual hardware and the app five years from now. Google has a habit of buying things and then quietly walking away from them once the acquisition stops being interesting on an earnings call. I'm not saying that's going to happen to Nest specifically — $3.2 billion is Google's second-biggest purchase ever, right behind Motorola Mobility, so presumably somebody there actually wants this to work out. But I've been burned by orphaned hardware before and it makes me twitchy every time a gadget company gets bought by a giant.
None of this is going to make me rip the thing off my wall, to be clear. It's a genuinely well-made piece of hardware and the app is nicer to use than basically anything else on my phone, including apps from companies whose entire business is apps. I just think it's funny, in a slightly uneasy way, that the appliance quietly regulating the temperature of my apartment is now owned by the same company that already answers when I ask it what year the Berlin Wall came down. That's a lot of one company knowing a lot about one modest one-bedroom in a building with radiators older than I am.
Anyway. Still cold in here. The radiator argument is not one Google engineering is going to solve for me, acquisition or not.