Following their recent acquisition of Nest, Google has purchased the company that makes Dropcam, a streaming webcam/security camera and associated Cloud Service.
The Interface is slick and simple, the devices and services are reasonably priced, and there's a lot of peace-of-mind that such an offering can provider.
However, as Extremetech points out, "Just imagine what Google could do with a real-time, high-res video feed of your home. Where the Nest thermostat might give Google some behavioral data — how warm/cold you like the house, your comings and goings — it pales in comparison to Dropcam. With Dropcam, Google would know exactly what you’re up to at any given time. If you’re preparing dinner, Google Now might automatically prompt you with “tips on how to make the perfect souffle.” If you’ve just brought a newborn baby back from the hospital, you might suddenly find lots of Google ads for diapers and strollers. If it hears you shouting at your game console, it might tailor your search results to show some different, less-antagonizing games."
We tend to fall more into the "Google is helpful" rather than the "Google is evil" category, but I have concerns about systems such as this and the current generation of gaming consoles, which is constantly streaming data off to some server somewhere else, with the only thing protecting me from how that data is used being the privacy policy that I didn't read and likely wouldn't understand in its nuanced legalese. Moreover, even if Google can be trusted, recent events have shown that once data is online, it can be hacked, and I'm not certain how comfortable I'd be with 7-30 days of my comings and goings available online for a would-be thief to study prior to breaking into my house.
Then again, this line of work has gone a long way to making me paranoid. So perhaps I'm overreacting. That Nest smoke detector does sound nice...
The Interface is slick and simple, the devices and services are reasonably priced, and there's a lot of peace-of-mind that such an offering can provider.
However, as Extremetech points out, "Just imagine what Google could do with a real-time, high-res video feed of your home. Where the Nest thermostat might give Google some behavioral data — how warm/cold you like the house, your comings and goings — it pales in comparison to Dropcam. With Dropcam, Google would know exactly what you’re up to at any given time. If you’re preparing dinner, Google Now might automatically prompt you with “tips on how to make the perfect souffle.” If you’ve just brought a newborn baby back from the hospital, you might suddenly find lots of Google ads for diapers and strollers. If it hears you shouting at your game console, it might tailor your search results to show some different, less-antagonizing games."
We tend to fall more into the "Google is helpful" rather than the "Google is evil" category, but I have concerns about systems such as this and the current generation of gaming consoles, which is constantly streaming data off to some server somewhere else, with the only thing protecting me from how that data is used being the privacy policy that I didn't read and likely wouldn't understand in its nuanced legalese. Moreover, even if Google can be trusted, recent events have shown that once data is online, it can be hacked, and I'm not certain how comfortable I'd be with 7-30 days of my comings and goings available online for a would-be thief to study prior to breaking into my house.
Then again, this line of work has gone a long way to making me paranoid. So perhaps I'm overreacting. That Nest smoke detector does sound nice...
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