You just bought one of those smart Nest thermostats. Very cool. A little too cool, actually: Your apartment starts getting chilly. Perhaps you should buy a lightly padded parka from your local H&M, suggests your Nest thermostat.
This frigid future won’t ever come to pass, promises Google. The tech titan today reiterated that it doesn’t plan to serve ads on devices from Nest Labs, which it acquired earlier this year for $3.2 billion.
A letter Google sent to the SEC in December (dug up by the Wall Street Journal this morning) refueled speculation that Google may bring ads to Nest and other smart devices.
As smart devices proliferate, “we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities,” reads the letter. “Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future, and thus our advertising systems are becoming increasingly device-agnostic.”
But a Google representative told VentureBeat the letter doesn’t reflect Google’s future plans.
“We are in contact with the SEC to clarify the language in this 2013 filing, which does not reflect Google’s product roadmap,” reads the company’s statement on the matter. “Nest, which we acquired after this filing was made, does not have an ads-based model and has never had any such plans.”
In other words, don’t expect Nest to push you to buy coats any time soon — there’s still a clear wall between Nest’s customer data and Google’s marketing business.
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Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »
The creator of the world’s first learning thermostat, Nest Labs is focused on reducing home-energy consumption. The Nest Learning Thermostat learns about you and your home to automatically turn itself down when you're away, guide you... read more »
Google pinkie swears: No ads are coming to Nest
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