So I've had a Nest thermostat bolted to my hallway wall since September, replacing the beige Honeywell dial thing that came with the house. I liked it. It learned my schedule, it had that little leaf icon that made me feel smug about saving energy, and it looked like something out of a spaceship next to my very not-spaceship drywall. Then last Monday Google announced it's buying Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash, and now I keep looking at the thing on my wall a little differently.
Three point two billion dollars. For a thermostat company (and a smoke detector, the Protect, which is $129 if you're curious and also very good at yelling "there is smoke" in a calm female voice at 2am when you burn toast). Tony Fadell, who ran the iPod team at Apple for years, started Nest with Matt Rogers back in 2010, and in about three and a half years they went from "what if a thermostat wasn't ugly" to a Google subsidiary. Thats an absurd trajectory and I dont think Im even mad about it, exactly. I just wasnt expecting to feel anything about a HVAC accessory.
Heres the thing that actually nags at me though. Nest, up until last week, had this whole pitch about being the anti-Google-ish company, a hardware company, not an ads company, not scraping your data to sell against you. Fadell said stuff in interviews about privacy being core to the product. And I believed it, mostly, because who's going to lie about their thermostat. But my thermostat has been quietly logging when I'm home, when I'm asleep, when the house is empty for a week because I went to see my parents. That's a pretty intimate dataset for a company that makes its money, nearly all of it, from knowing things about people so it can sell ads against that knowledge. Google says Nest data stays walled off from the ad business. Fine. I want to believe that. Im just old enough on the internet to remember a lot of "for now" promises that quietly stopped being true a few product cycles later.
Its funny timing too, because this whole thing landed the same week as that federal court ruling on net neutrality, a DC appeals court basically gutted the FCC's authority to enforce open internet rules, which is its own mess I dont have room to get into here but which put a lot of people (myself included, complaining on Twitter like it would help) in a mood about how much power a handful of companies already have over how we access and use the internet. And then a couple days later Obama's out there giving a speech about reining in NSA phone metadata collection. So you've got this whole week where the theme is basically "who is watching you and who gets to decide the rules," and in the middle of it my thermostat's parent company changes to one of the three or four companies on earth that knows the most about anyone, ever.
I'm not ripping the Nest off the wall. I like it too much, and also I have genuinely no idea how to reinstall a Honeywell dial thermostat at this point, Ive forgotten. But I did go dig through the settings menu last night looking for anything that says what gets shared with who, and mostly found a lot of vague language about "improving your experience," which, sure, that's what everyone says. My actual prediction, for what its worth: nothing changes for a year, maybe two. Then some quiet integration shows up, Nest data feeding into Google Now suggestions, maybe, "leaving work, want your house warm by the time you get there," and it'll feel convenient right up until the moment it feels like too much, and by then everyone will have forgotten there was ever a version of this where it wasnt Google's.
Anyway. My house is 68 degrees right now and the leaf is green, so in the most immediate sense nothing is wrong. Ask me again in a year.