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Comment by gress | Hacker News Reader

Yup, the want to avoid the headline: "Google buys network of in-home cameras."

They did make a point of explicitly saying none of the data is shared with Google. But, yeah, probably best for fit PR to differentiate.

Dropcam runs on AWS [1], "ingest[ing] more video per minute than YouTube" [2] into S3. Presumably the cost savings from switching to Google infrastructure will be compelling enough to change that. They'll probably torture the semantics and say "the data is there but Google can't access it".

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropcam/

[2] http://gigaom.com/2013/07/31/dropcam-gets-30m-for-expansion-...

Naturally what what they mean is not, this data will never exist on a computer/network owned by Google. What they mean is we aren't going use video from your security camera for general Google projects, like street view, collecting large amounts of speech databases for voice recognition, figuring out what products you and enjoy using and tailoring advertising to fit that, or tracking epidemics in real time by monitoring how many people in your house are sick.

Or providing video to law enforcement on demand.

Well of course they will do that. Any company in the US is compelled to follow the law and give up any information they can possibly access.

I guess it doesn't make much of a difference if Google or Amazon is doing it.

Amazon isn't in a position to build a law enforcement portal to this service. Google now is.

For now, maybe. But Google owns Nest, so Google owns the data, and one day they can easily decide to start looking at it. So either you don't care that Google can look at that data (which is fine), or you do care, and these kind of assurances should mean little to nothing.

Google has demonstrated zero hesitation about changing privacy policies when it suits them.

Hopefully it will make some noise if it changes at the next revision of the privacy policy...

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