So Google bought Nest a couple weeks back, $3.2 billion, all cash, and everybody I know who works in tech has spent every conversation since then telling me why I need a thermostat that talks to my phone. I still haven't bought one. I don't think I'm going to.
Let me back up. Nest makes two things, a learning thermostat that's $249 and a smoke detector called Protect that's $129, and both of them are genuinely clever pieces of hardware, Tony Fadell built the original iPod team at Apple, and it shows in the industrial design, the little chrome ring and the display that lights up warm orange or cool blue depending what its doing. I've held one at a friend's place. It's nice. That's not the issue.
The issue is I've got a plain white Honeywell round thermostat in my hallway that I turn with my hand, twice a day, and it has never once needed a firmware update, never phoned home, never asked me to accept a privacy policy. It's been on that wall since before I moved in and it will probably outlive me. There's something almost aggressive about how confidently the tech press has decided this is obviously the future and anyone still turning a dial is a fool who just hasn't been shown the light yet.
Maybe I'm the fool. I get the pitch: the thing learns your schedule, dials the heat down when you leave, saves you money over a winter, all of that. My complaint isn't really about the thermostat at all. Its about what happens to the data it collects once its sitting inside a company whose entire business model is knowing things about you. Nest says it won't share your data with Google for ads, and maybe that's true today, in January 2014, with the deal barely closed. Companies change their minds about stuff like this constantly, usually a couple years after everyone's forgotten to be worried about it.
And then on top of the Nest news you've got the ruling from earlier this month, the DC circuit tossing out the FCC's open internet rules because Verizon sued and won on a technicality about how broadband got classified back in the mid-2000s. Two stories that on the surface have nothing to do with each other, except they both come down to the same thing: a small number of companies deciding how the pipes and the boxes in your house get to behave, without you getting much of a vote. I'm not trying to make some grand point out of it. I just noticed I read both stories in the same week and got the same slightly queasy feeling from each.
I'm not buying a smart thermostat. I might be totally wrong about this in five years and buying one used off Craigslist because the alternative got discontinued. Wouldn't be the first time I dug my heels in over something dumb. I held out on a smartphone until 2011, told everyone my flip phone did everything I needed, and now I check Twitter in bed like everyone else. So take the opinion for what its worth, which is not much, from a guy typing this on a laptop that's older than my nephew.
If you've already got a Nest, I'm not judging you, mostly. Tell me if the learning thing actually works or if it just guesses wrong for the first month like I've heard from a couple people. I'm curious, I just don't want to be an early adopter for something bolted to my wall that needs a software update to keep my house at 68 degrees.