Nest CEO Tony Fadell promised in an interview that any privacy policy changes that could follow after Google purchased his company will be transparent and opt-in for users. The exec said in an interview at the DLD Conference in Munich that there are no new privacy policy changes at this time, and the data collected by the company only pertains to “products and improving them.”
“If there were any changes whatsoever, we would be sure to be transparent about it, number one, and number two for you to opt-in to it,” Fadell said,
Google announced a week ago that it bought Nest Labs for an impressive $3.2 billion, with Fadell to continue to lead the company following the purchase. The former Apple employee known for his role in iPod and iPhone development, said that the discussions with Google took months, “and in some cases years to finalize,” The Next Web reports. “This is a hand and glove fit,” Fadell said about the Google-Nest deal.
“The amount of things that I learned from [Larry Page and other Google execs,] personally, in the same meetings that they learned from me, personally…the two way interchange of what was for me intellectual happiness and the stimulation of being able to go back and forth, and really create a new world together – and in a different way than either of us had imagined – that was personally exciting to me,” Fadell said. However, the exec did not reveal the exact nature of his negotiations with the company.
Nest has faced some criticism in the past few days, with some device owners returning their devices in response to Google’s purchase. Google has been surrounded by various privacy-related scandals, facing investigations and having to pay privacy-related fines in many countries. The company has also been criticized for its consolidated privacy policy, but also for services that are opt-out by default for users instead of opt-in – such as the “email Google+ users directly from Gmail” feature that was recently released.
