We’ve long been fans of the Nest thermostat. It’s smart enough to give people instant feel-goods when they make energy-efficient choices — and smart enough to learn their preferences, so that their homes never get too hot or too cold, but juuust right. And apparently Google agrees with us, because the company just spent $3.2 billion to acquire Nest.
It’s not really clear what that’ll mean in the long term, but Nest promises it won’t act creepy just ‘cause it’s joining Google. The Verge writes:
Unsurprisingly, the company is remaining coy about how it’ll integrate with Google’s existing product lineup. “Nest’s product line obviously caught the attention of Google and I’m betting that there’s a lot of cool stuff we could do together, but nothing to share today,” writes [Nest cofounder Matt] Rogers. He did address any potential concerns about Nest’s customer data being opened up to Google for advertising or other purposes. “Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services,” writes Rogers. “We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.”
We applaud that. While we are interested in energy efficiency, we don’t really need to know who on our Google+ network is cold right now.
