This story is a little more complicated than the title. Dropcam, one of the world’s most popular home monitor systems, is being bought out by Nest for over $550 million.
If you don’t know what Nest is, they make smoke detectors and thermostats. Now Nest, who just purchased Dropcam, is being acquired by Google for 3.2 billion dollars. Got that? According to Nest co-founder Matt Rodgers, Dropcam will be moving it’s headquarters from San Francisco to Palo Alto, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. Dropcam’s home security cameras will run you little money a pop, but that’s just part of this story. Dropcam once tried to use existing cameras to support video achieves. But since most of the market wasn’t buying it, they made their own.
I’m pretty concerned about these acquisitions. It’s not just because one corporation will have so much power and dominance, leaving little if any room for competition. So Google wants to control the home thermostat and smoke detector market now?? But privacy issues come to mind. With Google and Nest owning Dropcam, can’t that give them a license to look into our homes and businesses, even during our most private moments? Nest insists we shouldn’t worry. They claim, “Dropcam will come under Nest?s privacy policy, which explains that data won?t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer?s permission.” I’ll believe it when I see it. Am I being too skeptical here?