5 ms·

Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats

39 points by sdoering 11mo ago

tencentshill 11mo ago
So even their thinly-vailed claim of using the data for support and "issue diagnostics" falls flat, because they don't even provided support for the device at all. It's just data collection. Even claiming it's for academic research datasets would be a better excuse.
- gruez 11mo ago
  Seems far more likely that they use a microservices architecture, and while they decommed the frontend that allows users to adjust their thermostats, they haven't bothered decomming the telemetry data ingestion services yet.
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I still have the screenshot somewhere. About four years ago, me and my wife were at her sister's home. As I talk to her husband about the paved driveway he fixed up the day before, in front of their Nest camera doorbell thingymajig, he says the words "yeah I saw I could buy like airport grade tar, and I thought to myself, why would I need that for a car?" the next day, I pop open Instagram. Lo and behold, something I never googled, an ad for airport grade tar shows up on Instagram. I'm told that "no they're not listening" and "they use your debit card info to make educated guesses" how in God's green earth would this have happened, I have never bought any level of tar for one, nor googled it, nor ever intended on it. Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours. Another fun one was the time a friend was telling me about a niche ramen, by brand name on Discord. I pop open Facebook, what do I see? The EXACT ramen brand is the very next ad. If they aren't watching us for ad revenue I'm going to go crazy with all these insane coincidences.
- gruez 11mo ago
  >Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours. Surely this is easy to test? Come up with a list of 100 topics. Of those, randomly choose 50. Work them into your conversations, and collect all the ads you've seen. Note down how ads you get for the 50 topics you've chosen compared to the topics you haven't chosen. Better yet, give your phone to your friend and have him say the ads, so you don't get confirmation bias. This is all very easy to do, and the conspiracy that facebook/google/whatever is secretly listening to you isn't exactly fringe either. Yet, I'm not of any rigorous testing that proves it's real. While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it's a good reason to be skeptical.
  - codedokode 11mo ago
    Let's also consider this theoretically from business point of view. If you were an ad network, and you could listen to what your customers talk about, would you use it or not?
    - gruez 11mo ago
      If the implication is that ad networks would want to, and therefore it's happening, that's terrible logic. I'm sure the US government would love to convince everyone they landed on the moon and won the space race, without actually having to send a rocket to the moon, but that doesn't mean that means the moon landing was faked.
      - ndriscoll 11mo ago
        Part of the point of the space race was to flex on how technologically ahead we were with the implication that our weapons systems were also more advanced, so I suspect that given the choice to actually have more advanced technology vs. merely convincing everyone they did, they would prefer to have actually had that capability. Surveillance companies would presumably also prefer to actually have such capabilities while not broadcasting that fact lest people avoid them or demand they be regulated.
izend 11mo ago
As soon as Cody Kociemba open sources his firmware I'm going to apply it to my Nest 1st gen. It is ridiculous Google is turning off the support, it is probably because they don't want to support the old API or something...
- dangus 11mo ago
  I just threw my unsupported Nest in the trash, just like Google wanted, and got something else. After all, that’s what they want me to do. Well, their first preference would be for me to buy another one. Even if I were to put some kind of open source thing on it, I don’t want visitors to my house to see Nest hardware and for Google to get that slight amount of free advertising.
  - izend 11mo ago
    What a waste... I like the style of it, still works fine after 10 years and it works with old furnaces. The environmentalists should be all over Google for this debacle.
time4tea 11mo ago
Real time pressure information is valuable when being reported from lots of geographically dispersed devices. Its a way of tracking weather fronts. The "discontinued" device is still a little google money printer.

39 points by sdoering 11mo ago

So even their thinly-vailed claim of using the data for support and "issue diagnostics" falls flat, because they don't even provided support for the device at all. It's just data collection. Even claiming it's for academic research datasets would be a better excuse.

gruez 11mo ago
Seems far more likely that they use a microservices architecture, and while they decommed the frontend that allows users to adjust their thermostats, they haven't bothered decomming the telemetry data ingestion services yet.

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

I still have the screenshot somewhere. About four years ago, me and my wife were at her sister's home. As I talk to her husband about the paved driveway he fixed up the day before, in front of their Nest camera doorbell thingymajig, he says the words "yeah I saw I could buy like airport grade tar, and I thought to myself, why would I need that for a car?" the next day, I pop open Instagram. Lo and behold, something I never googled, an ad for airport grade tar shows up on Instagram. I'm told that "no they're not listening" and "they use your debit card info to make educated guesses" how in God's green earth would this have happened, I have never bought any level of tar for one, nor googled it, nor ever intended on it. Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours. Another fun one was the time a friend was telling me about a niche ramen, by brand name on Discord. I pop open Facebook, what do I see? The EXACT ramen brand is the very next ad. If they aren't watching us for ad revenue I'm going to go crazy with all these insane coincidences.

gruez 11mo ago
>Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours. Surely this is easy to test? Come up with a list of 100 topics. Of those, randomly choose 50. Work them into your conversations, and collect all the ads you've seen. Note down how ads you get for the 50 topics you've chosen compared to the topics you haven't chosen. Better yet, give your phone to your friend and have him say the ads, so you don't get confirmation bias. This is all very easy to do, and the conspiracy that facebook/google/whatever is secretly listening to you isn't exactly fringe either. Yet, I'm not of any rigorous testing that proves it's real. While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it's a good reason to be skeptical.
- codedokode 11mo ago
  Let's also consider this theoretically from business point of view. If you were an ad network, and you could listen to what your customers talk about, would you use it or not?
  - gruez 11mo ago
    If the implication is that ad networks would want to, and therefore it's happening, that's terrible logic. I'm sure the US government would love to convince everyone they landed on the moon and won the space race, without actually having to send a rocket to the moon, but that doesn't mean that means the moon landing was faked.
    - ndriscoll 11mo ago
      Part of the point of the space race was to flex on how technologically ahead we were with the implication that our weapons systems were also more advanced, so I suspect that given the choice to actually have more advanced technology vs. merely convincing everyone they did, they would prefer to have actually had that capability. Surveillance companies would presumably also prefer to actually have such capabilities while not broadcasting that fact lest people avoid them or demand they be regulated.

izend 11mo ago

As soon as Cody Kociemba open sources his firmware I'm going to apply it to my Nest 1st gen. It is ridiculous Google is turning off the support, it is probably because they don't want to support the old API or something...

dangus 11mo ago
I just threw my unsupported Nest in the trash, just like Google wanted, and got something else. After all, that’s what they want me to do. Well, their first preference would be for me to buy another one. Even if I were to put some kind of open source thing on it, I don’t want visitors to my house to see Nest hardware and for Google to get that slight amount of free advertising.
- izend 11mo ago
  What a waste... I like the style of it, still works fine after 10 years and it works with old furnaces. The environmentalists should be all over Google for this debacle.

time4tea 11mo ago

Real time pressure information is valuable when being reported from lots of geographically dispersed devices. Its a way of tracking weather fronts. The "discontinued" device is still a little google money printer.