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Google's Next Step in Real-Time Surveillance

posted by n1 on Thursday November 06 2014, @03:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the hunt-the-consumer dept.

An anonymous coward writes with an article from PandoDaily:

Nest plans to offer its smart thermostat to Irish consumers for free when they sign up for a two-year contract with Electric Ireland. Nest chief executive Tony Fadell said at the Web Summit in Dublin that the deal could put his company’s thermostats in up to 1.6 million homes, according to CNET, and claimed that similar deals would be announced for other countries in the future.

[...] Google is infamous for its ability to offer consumers products which are paid for not by their users but by the ads those users see. Its products are among the best in their categories, and when it’s free to use them, there’s little reason for consumers to pay for another service. Now Google is just applying that same logic to the real world — and it will probably work out for it just as well.

Even I’ve grown sick of hearing this sentiment, but it’s more relevant now than ever: If you aren’t the one paying for a service, you are the product.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:00AM (#113441)

    oh, and before anyone suggests that a 'smart fridge' could save a lot of money by letting you know what's inside without opening door...

    how about a fridge with a transparent door? simple solutions are better than 'smart' ones.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday November 06 2014, @08:49AM

    by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Thursday November 06 2014, @08:49AM (#113465) Journal

    Transparent door? This would solve the fridge light mystery at last!

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Geezer on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:22PM

      by Geezer (511) on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:22PM (#113502)

      This mystery was definitively solved in 1971 at the North Hall dormitory at the University of Redlands, when an asian exchange engineering student volunteered to be placed inside a functional refrigerator with the shelving removed (originally to permit pony keg cooling). Unlike Schoedinger's cat, said student survived the experiment and was rewarded in the prevailing fashion of engineering students of the era: beer.

  • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:22PM

    by Open4D (371) on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:22PM (#113501) Journal

    But aren't materials that are transparent to light also less good at heat insulation? And if only one surface is transparent you can't see what's on the other side of the fridge because things are in the way.

    So, maybe little cameras in various positions inside the fridge are the way forward?