Google invests $450 million in ADT, gets exclusive hardware deal

Yeah- I have the cheaper Nest thermostat, and Google actually removed abilities when they rolled it into Google home. But then again, how many years has it been since they made something great, instead of buying something and killing it?
 
I gotta say, I initially misread this as ADP and I was thinking having Google involved in payroll would be horrible. Glad I re-read the post.
 
DWolvin said:
Yeah- I have the cheaper Nest thermostat, and Google actually removed abilities when they rolled it into Google home. But then again, how many years has it been since they made something great, instead of buying something and killing it?
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Gmail?
 
Nside said:
Amazon and Google are doing everything within their power (that they seem to regulate themselves) to be able to monitor your every move.
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Yeah, they even sent me a Google Home Mini for free. Went to the mailbox one day and was like "I don't recall ordering anything" but there it was.

Can't say I wasn't a little suspect with Google sending free hardware, feel like they wanted something out of that deal.
 
Nside said:
Amazon and Google are doing everything within their power (that they seem to regulate themselves) to be able to monitor your every move.
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They don't really care about you as an individual though, its about the power of understanding and eventually even controlling trends with that information and the use of AIs. People like to think that we're unique snowflakes, and perhaps on some level that's true, but on a macro level there are a limited number of population clusters that behave rather predictably with a shared culture and general programming (basically, everyone is a type in the broad sense). Its like Google maps, you may not be able to predict where any particular individual will be at any given moment, but after farming that data for a while you can very accurately predict traffic patterns and when you understand those patterns you can even learn how to exploit or shape them. As these megacorproations become more political, with Google again certainly being one of those having meetings about how to shape the public to produce desirable election outcomes, this gives credence to sci-fis in which national governments become obsolete and you just have a few competing megacorps taking their place on deciding policy and controlling the fates of billions.

tl;dr: If you care about nationalism, insist on enforcing anti-monopoly legislation immediately to break up the tech giants, if its not already too late.
 
I still put tape over my laptop cam, I can't imagine if they tried to force Nest products into my ADT system. I have started to phase in Eufy cameras I monitor myself this might push me the rest of the way out the door.
 
LOL ADT has customers that still have panels that need conversion to analog phones from the old click phone dialers. I don't think anyone needs to worry about being 'forced' to upgrade anything.

Now they will probably offer a very sweet deal making the upgrade much more attractive.

And honestly if they gave people a wall mountable good quality tablet as their 'alarm panel' had live chat for support and help. And camera integration at little to no out of pocket cost... hell I'd sign up for that. Then again I have Alexa devices in my home so I guess my metadata is already metagone.
 
SticKx911 said:
Gmail?
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Yeah... I have that as about 16 years ago. Pixels are decent (as others brought up), but aren't as good as the concept of the nexuses... Google couldn't resist branching it's stuff to make 'their' base android different than stock.
 
1_rick said:
I gotta say, I initially misread this as ADP and I was thinking having Google involved in payroll would be horrible. Glad I re-read the post.
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i did the exact same thing when i read it since my work uses ADP for new hires.
 
Well lets see what this does to my 2020 ADT rate spike. They raise the rates every year, I call them every 3-5 years and threaten to jump ship to get a discount.

And yeah my equipment is straight out of the 90's. They will fix what's broken but charge for upgrades. Maybe they will lessen that in order to gain market share installing the nest devices for cheap/free.

But like others have said, yeah I don't want to merge my gmail with my ADT, LOL
 
There is just more and more evidence coming showcasing how "IoT / home automation + security / AI assistant" platforms are being used not for the benefit of the owner, but for the platform owner who profits from the data gathered at every level. Years ago I was so surprised and frustrated to see that Nest cameras couldn't by default simply spawn a secure web server for management or save media on a LAN, instead requiring particular apps which routed everything through Google first! Likewise for Ring and other video doorbells etc. It isn't like these were set up ( at least at the time, I've not looked for ages) that saving everything to the cloud was an optional, value added service users could choose if they wish (perhaps with a subscription for storage,, zero knowledge encryption etc) but it was designed as the ONLY option. I don't even want to get started on the "Amazon/Ring just giving police and other law enforcement or intelligence ser backdoor access to all Ring products warrantlessly in order to 'prevent crime' " . What's worse is that all of these products could at least have the option to not require these kinds of integrations, able to be used manually and in an open (source) way tc.

To the degree users are capable/comfortable, its always better to seek out alternate hardware that is not designed to cater to corporate integration and manage it with open source software. Hell, if you already have certain items from Nest, Ring and the like at very least look into ways to castrate their communication with corporate overlords and manage them using alternative software. Tech like Zoneminder ( https://www.zoneminder.com/ ) for video/monitoring, Mycroft ( https://mycroft.ai/ ) as the most promising and full featured voice assistant I've seen, and OpenHAB ( https://www.openhab.org/ ) for a massive amount of IoT/SmartHome integration, command and control etc... are just a few of the open source alternatives worth checking out vs the big name proprietary options.
 
Rev. Night said:
How much to wire a closed circuit TV?
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Quality CCTV installs are expensive, most of the cost is the labor to pull the wire to the cameras, which can be a monumental pain in the ass. I've done wire pulls in apartments, warehouses and residential homes, it's not fun, but it pays good. Sometimes you have to get very creative to get wire in certain places, which jacks up the labor cost even more because it takes quite a bit of time.

Low ball trunk slammer installers usually do it the garbage way and use cheap shit wireless cameras, or tack the wire along the wall and often don't even try to make it look nice with trim. I've had to come behind trash installs like that and completely redo everything because nothing was done right.
 
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