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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: 2) by strattitarius on Thursday November 06 2014, @06:58PM

    by strattitarius (3191) on Thursday November 06 2014, @06:58PM (#113610) Journal
    I don't get how setting the thermostat at 55 would allow the pipes to freeze? If the heater kicked on at 55 and stayed on constantly, yet the cold was so bad that it couldn't keep up, I just don't see how setting it to 80 would have helped (or anything else for that matter).

    So far I am in agreement with OP that it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Thermostats were a solution to a problem. Programmable thermostats were a solution to a problem.
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by novak on Thursday November 06 2014, @08:48PM

    by novak (4683) on Thursday November 06 2014, @08:48PM (#113651) Homepage

    Because your house is not at 55F everywhere, and the pipes usually explode under the floor or in a crawlspace or in a place where it is colder than where your thermostat monitors it.

    A lower tech solution to this problem is called "having friends check your house." Much less automated, much less snazzy, probably cheaper, and doesn't involve you with spy companies.

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    • (Score: 2) by strattitarius on Thursday November 06 2014, @10:09PM

      by strattitarius (3191) on Thursday November 06 2014, @10:09PM (#113670) Journal
      Holy crap. I had a rental years ago and we moved out in the middle of winter. A couple of weeks later we checked on our deposit return and they claimed we were responsible for pipes that froze and busted.

      There was an argument about who last touched the heater. 2 of us thought we had set it to 50-55 and figured someone else must have turned it off completely. The other roommates said they didn't touch it. Never occurred to any of us that we could have had frozen pipes with the heater set at 55, but that might explain how that happened.
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