Last night was an interesting night to preview German news (channel one from the state network). Google made it once again into the top three of the evening. Yeah, it was another negative slant against the company.
Google went out yesterday and bought for $3.2 billion....Nest. Nest is this developmental company that is arming your entire house in some fashion.....to talk to your cellphone or computer. As you leave the house, a monitor will note that no one is in the house and raise the temp (in the summer) or lower your temp (in the winter). It'll monitor security, fire issues, and could possibly get into dozens of household cost items in the future.
Nest is a company that might work itself into half the homes in any urban city within the next decade. The gadgets? All simple to install and operate. I suspect they've studied their customers and know that simplicity is the way to get people interested.
So, why the German negative hype?
As far as the German media is concerned.....Google is again trying to get at your personal information....personal data. This time....it'll be arrangements in the home, your energy usage, the amount of time you spend in the house, and likely calculate if you are wasteful or reasonable on energy.
In the short fifteen minutes news period at 8PM last night.....it was a bullet-format piece taking two minutes. Later around 9:45PM.....it was a five-minute piece. All negative on Google.
My general take is that if Google didn't buy Nest, then Microsoft would have done it. Valuable personal data? If you wanted to save energy.....it's pretty much a guaranteed thing that you have to share your lifestyle with some computer somewhere. For Germans, it's the virtual end of privacy.....as far as they are concerned.
If a computer ever figures out the lifestyle of Huns (he drinks four beers every single night after work, watches three hours of sports every evening, and sits mostly in his underwear in the winter months, which means a higher-than-average heating temperature), or Bertha (she stays in the house 23.5 hours a day because of seven cats, drinks only bottled water from France because of a vacation there in 1988, and watches the Arte Channel sixteen hours a day because it makes her cultured)......things would go downhill.
The media might suddenly wake up and realize that Germans are a bit weird. Weird....like those American folks, or those Dutch folks, or those British folks. Privacy rules help to maintain the status quo. Or so they believe.
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