Google Thinks Ads Will Begin Appearing On Thermostats, Refrigerators And Elsewhere
If advertisements bother you, this will really get under your skin.
In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, Google said it could be serving ads and other content on "refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities," according to The Wall Street Journal.
The statement about ads stemmed from the company's argument that it shouldn't not be required to disclose revenue from mobile devices. If it is required to report that revenue, Google posed the question: what about other foreseeable places ads could appear?
"Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future," the company said in the filing.
Google already has a firm grasp on the mobile phone market. Its Android operating system runs on nearly 80 percent of devices shipped in 2013, according to Strategy Analytics.
If it remains true to the intentions in the December letter, it will be in other devices as well. In some ways, it already has.
Google Glass is now available to public and, "perhaps its most high-profile move in the home, Google announced a $3.2 billion deal in January to buy Nest Labs, a startup known for smart thermostats and smoke detectors-a few weeks after it told the SEC to expect ads and other content on such devices," according to The Wall Street Journal.
Google said that Nest has never had an ad-based model and did not at the time it was acquired. That doesn't mean Google can't think about it or that ads won't someday appear next to the temperature reading in your home.
After Nest was aquired, it posted a statement reassuring customers about Google access to the product and their privacy:
"Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest's products and services. We've always taken privacy seriously and this will not change."