Say Goodbye To Privacy: How Nest Might Transform Google

Tero Kuittinen | BGR | January 14, 2014

It’s no wonder some people are freaking out over Google’s $3.2 billion Nest Labs acquisition: it’s another step towards a future when Google has enough access to lives of high-income consumers to gain psychological insights that no company has ever possessed. Nest’s Learning Thermostat can track movements and activity of people in their homes, an ability no doubt improving by leaps and bounds. If you combine this with analysis of email and search patterns, as well as smartphone GPS mapping of movement outside the home, you get to an exceptionally sweet spot for building an intimate profile of not only current consumption patterns, but of likely future choices as well.

Do you live alone and go to bed after 1:00 a.m., sleep in until 11:00 a.m. on the weekends, access porn more than two hours a week and visit the fridge eight times a day? Ads for therapy, depression medication and weight control measures may be in order. Are you visiting neighborhood bars at least twice a week and bringing back different dates between two and four times each month? Durex and Valtrex may be popping up in YouTube videos you watch with increasing frequency.

Combining information of what happens in our homes with search data and email keywords can be an incredibly potent combination.