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Analysts often note that Google wanders from its core business with acquisitions like connected-thermostat maker Nest and robotics heavyweights like Boston Dynamics, or even on adventures like self-driving cars. These of course create new and complicated revenue opportunities. But they also connect the company to robust nodes and sensors to gather data on our world.

And that has always been Google’s business.

Last week smart device kit maker Spark hacked together the working equivalent of a Nest thermostat in about 24-hours, just a couple days after Google announced it would pay $3.2 billion for the company.

Of course, their hack isn’t as slick as a Nest thermostat and Spark CEO Zach Supalla laughs when I ask where his company’s quick replication came up short: “Lots of places.” He lauds Nest’s user interface and slick design. But he also concedes that with more than a day’s work, a lot of designers could get close to Nest’s aesthetic.

Undoubtedly, none of that is lost on Google. There are only so many elegant ways to manage the heat. A lot of Nest’s value lies in its production chain, installed customer base and talented engineers that built the product. But from a company like Google’s perspective, the value goes further than that.

“The machine learning aspect is really powerful. It observes your presence. It kinda figures you out, and makes your home more comfortable,” Supalla says.

“Sure, you need algorithms, but you really need data.”

After the Nest acquisition news Slate noted that Google is “probably best thought of at this point as a machine-learning company. That is, its goal is to imbue machines with the ability to respond and adapt themselves to human behaviors and environments, so that machines become not only more personalized, but fundamentally more human-like.”

All of that is true except one little bit: “At this point.”

Google has been educating machines since Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank, the algorithm that basically organized today’s Internet. Google’s special sauce(s) has always responded and adapted to human behaviors and environments as we search and surf the Internet. We want our search results to be human-like: we have a question and need an answer. Google becoming an advertising company was simply a side-effect — the best way to make money from the artificial intelligence. Unless you printed this article out, you are staring at Google’s first drone, robot, connected device, or whatever you want to call it, right now.

Michael Mace, founder of informatics outfit Zekira, noted on Monday in a well-circulated blog post that “Google’s mission statement to ‘organize the world’s information’ is no longer a meaningful guide to its actions. To me, the company looks less and less like a unified product company and more and more like a post-modern conglomerate.”

But information is the unified product. And laying claim to the pipes — whether a thermostat or fiber optic cable — to route it all back to Mountain View is the game. Google says it will be hands-off with Nest’s brand and strategy — the company of 200 already knows their business. In fact, notice that Google itself stays away from producing hardware — giving away Android to smartphone makers and outsourcing construction of Google-branded Nexus and Chromebook products — instead, focusing on the 1’s and 0’s that come out of them.

Numbers on Nest’s market penetration are tough to pin down. The company doesn’t say much. In December Nest CEO Tony Fadell told Forbes one percent of American homes had Nest devices — a number to take with a very large grain of salt. But search around product reviews and sales channels like Amazon and you’ll find robust discussion in the comments.

Spark’s Supalla points out that even though anyone can hack a device for their own home, when you enmesh that information with the rest of the planet, those devices get even more aware of people’s patterns and get better at making predictions. “That’s the kind of thing you can’t build in a day,” he says.

This all invites the obvious privacy concerns. Connected devices raise the similar questions about malicious intents and snooping our data as web browsers and computers. At a conference on Monday, Nest CEO Tony Fadell said future privacy policy changes under Google will be opt-in — meaning the user has to chose to accept the changes — and that it will be transparent. However subsequent customers might need to opt-in to activate their new device.

But let’s not assume that knowing whether your toes are toasty is the limit. Even energy consumption habits say a lot about you. In 2011 a group of University of Washington researchers showed they could figure out what programs you were watching on television by measuring changes to your powerlines.

Sensors, sensors everywhere, and plenty of bytes to think.

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