Also I fail to see any actual privacy-related consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal - there's some fear-mongering over some targeted ads seen by some people but that is not a privacy breach nor a scandal. They broke TOS for Facebook API, but outside of that, what they eventually did with the data wasn't out of the ordinary. In other words, there may be concerns with the source data, but the source data was merely used to compute what is ordinarily considered non-sensitive information: a list to target given some political ad campaigns. Every single campaign does the latter, whether through email or direct mail. Hypothetically, if Zynga did this with Facebook API - to better target future potential customers, how much outrage would there be? Privacy-wise, it's exactly the same.
Marketers at nearly all large companies routinely do much worse with sensitive information. What personal information anyone cares about was used in a bad way here? Hypothetically, if there was an ad-platform that allowed you to specifically run targeted ad campaigns political opinions/leanings/etc as computed by the platform, this would not be an issue per se by the norms of the ad industry. It appears to me that what most people are upset about it has more to do: 1) how targeted advertising normally works and 2) that the political campaign of someone they don't want as president was helped by this. But targeted advertising is absolutely not illegal or anything and politicians you don't like still get to run campaigns. The actual amount of wrong-doing here is miniscule and the part that is attributable to Facebook is even smaller.
And the point is that any of this could absolutely happen with Nest. Nest does involve sensitive information and for instance, Nest cams don't have consent from every single person they happen to record either. I don't know exactly what nest API allowed apps to do but it would be hard to imagine that there's no possibility of scandal.
Marketers at nearly all large companies routinely do much worse with sensitive information. What personal information anyone cares about was used in a bad way here? Hypothetically, if there was an ad-platform that allowed you to specifically run targeted ad campaigns political opinions/leanings/etc as computed by the platform, this would not be an issue per se by the norms of the ad industry. It appears to me that what most people are upset about it has more to do: 1) how targeted advertising normally works and 2) that the political campaign of someone they don't want as president was helped by this. But targeted advertising is absolutely not illegal or anything and politicians you don't like still get to run campaigns. The actual amount of wrong-doing here is miniscule and the part that is attributable to Facebook is even smaller.
And the point is that any of this could absolutely happen with Nest. Nest does involve sensitive information and for instance, Nest cams don't have consent from every single person they happen to record either. I don't know exactly what nest API allowed apps to do but it would be hard to imagine that there's no possibility of scandal.