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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Good morning. On this episode of the show, we're gonna take a look at the recent moves by nest and how they impact your privacy. Now, Nest labs was founded in 2010 and quickly brought the nest learning thermostat to market.
This iconic product was a transformative product for the smart home. You see it everywhere. I've got one in the other room here. Now, by managing the temperature of their homes automatically, it solved a legitimate problem for users while at the same time, potentially saving them some money.
This combination led to significant market success and number of other nest products like the nest protect uh smoke and carbon monoxide detector. The nest cam uh security cameras, they have indoor and outdoor versions, the nest, hello, a smart doorbell and the oddly named Nest X Yale, smart door lock.
I have mixed thoughts about that one, but this set of products led nest to making a push to be the key part of the smart home fabric. Their works with nest program. This program allowed third party devices to communicate with nest products.
Now due to their success, a larger move within the smart honey ecosystem was really inevitable. And on January 13th of 2014, Google came in and announced plans to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash.
Now, the early days of this acquisition were pretty typical, there were no significant external moves that would really be of concern to users. But in 2016, the story started to change Nest Labs co-founder uh Tony Fidel left the company.
Um and you know, it's not unusual but it was a little rocky. And despite the growing the Google's business unit, right, Nest was now a piece of Google to 1200 employees. Nest didn't really deliver on the vision Google had for the team and they didn't really deliver anything really, nothing changed over the that time span.
Now, during all of this nest, users had access to their devices through a dedicated app, right? Uh and website that has its own data privacy policy. There is very little Google at play.
In fact, unless you really dug for it, you really look for it, you probably weren't even aware that these were essentially Google devices. Now, Nest isn't the first IOT or smart home company acquired.
Um In fact, in 2014, the same year, it acquired Nest. Google also bought a company called Revolve. No E because that was cooler. Revolve made a smart home hub. It was ugly as sin, but it coordinate all of the other devices in your home.
Now, unfortunately, the revolve device met with a bitter end. In 2016, the devices were remotely disabled. They were bricked from afar and the rumors and the stories around all this point to the core technology from revolve being used elsewhere in the nest unit.
But the stand alone devices were basically cast aside as resources were shifted towards this new works with nest program. That was the first real true flag. And a reminder that even though you bought the device, it wasn't really yours.
Smart home devices require services running in the background to properly work. And when a company changes hands or shifts priorities, users may be left out in the cold. Now noted author Cory Doctorow explores this idea in his latest book Radicalized.
Now, this book consists of four intensely political sci fi stories that examine society from a number of angles. Now, one of those angles is through DRM locked appliances in the story and don't worry, no spoilers here, read the book.
It is absolutely definitely worth it. Corey examines the impact on a community when their daily lives are tied to corporate interests. Now, you might think that the view presented in the book is extreme, but we're seeing small hints of it in the Nest revolve Google story.
And while you're checking out Corey's work, make sure to read makers as well. That story explores what a world of individual manufacturing V to VA 3D printing would look like. And again, with a healthy dose of political experimentation around copyright and ownership back to today.
And the story at hand recently here in 2019 at Google IO, Google announced some significant changes to how they handle and market the nest line of products. They're stand alone no longer. The new naming scheme for the products is Google Nest.
So Google nest learning thermostat and the Google nest protect and so on and so on. More importantly, the works with nest program has been canceled. The preferred method for working with these devices now is via the works with Google Assistant program.
And while Google is making a rather large exception for Amazon Alexa integration, this is a clear indication of a shift in their strategy around the smart home. Now, Google Assistant is at the core N account holders will be strongly encouraged to move to Google accounts for their devices uh and device data data about how your home works.
Now, this will now fall under the Google privacy policy versus the original Nest labs policy and there are some significant differences. Observers also expected the nest app to fall by the wayside in the not too distant future.
So, OK, that was a huge big story. But what does all of this mean specifically, what does it mean through a cybersecurity and a privacy lens? Well, this story is really a clear reminder that your device is rarely actually yours adding smarts to devices um in your home, really ties the operation of your home to a set of services that are running somewhere by someone, not you, you want proof disable the wi fi in your house for an hour.
I know it's crazy. Bear with me and see what stops working. It's a sad and startling experience. There are significant questions that need to be addressed here and I, I don't have the answers, but I definitely have some of the questions.
Questions like who controls the data about your home when a company sold? Does that data access also get old? Do you have a say in it at all? Is there a transition plan? If the company that provides your smart oven services is sold to another?
There's no clear answers here. I definitely don't have them. I don't think they're out there at all. Now, Corey Doctorow presents one viewpoint in his book, Radicalized and without discussion about these issues in the open regulation or legislation to enforce a community decision.
Corey's story may well end up becoming reality and while it's a well written story that I really enjoyed reading, I don't want to live in it. Do you, what do you think? Let me know online where I'm uh at Mark NC A in the comments down below.
And as always by email me at Mark N dot ca, I look forward to discussing this issue with you online and we'll see you on the next episode of the show.
