Recently, we saw the launch ofGoogle Home Hubthat came integrated with Google Nest — a smart home surveillance feature. While the idea of a smart home does sound exciting, you might want to think twice as the data gathered from surveillance can be accessed by government bodies as well.
A recentreport by Forbes, reveals thatGoogle-owned Nest Labshas been asked more than300 times since 2015to hand over surveillance data to governments and intelligence agencies.
After Google’s acquisition of Nest Labs,transparency reportsreleased by the company shows nearly 60 requests for data were received in the first half of this year itself. In fact, the government has sought data for 525 different Nest account holders since 2015.
The transparencyreports issued by Nest isn’t as detailedas Google or other major companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. There areno specific numberson data requests except for bar charts in terms of percentage.
It is also clear that Nest gives away information in several cases, but for most the cases, it doesn’t. In the first six months this year, the companyhanded over data in less than 20% cases.
This number is so far the lowest for the Google subsidiary ever since it started. Back in 2015, the stats went high as 60% for the second half.
Another noteworthy point is that the company hasn’t received a National Security Letter yet. NSLs are generally filed by intelligence agencies whenever they are looking for company data.
Such warrants also come with a gag order to prevent businesses from learning about their very existence. So it means that if Nest ever removes a disclaimer that says it hasn’t received an NSL, it would imply that the company has received one.
