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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:42AM
and it's not just the 'big boys'
every fitness widget, mileage tracker for your car or other gizmo that connects to your phone, even though your phone is powerful enough to process and present you with the results immediately, instead, the device makers app helpfully forces you [otherwise, the widget does NOTHING for you] to create an account on their web site, uploads your data to their web site, and then promptly rents your data to every tom, dick and harry that happens to walk by with a dollar [of course, it is incompetently anonymized].