Google extends its connected home play in $555M Dropcam buy

After much speculation, Google-owned Nest has officially acquired connected-camera company Dropcam.

The company announced the deal in a blog post today; it comes out to $555 million in cash, Re/code reported.

Dropcam will remain independent until the deal closes, and it will then proceed to integrate with Nest. From Nest founder and engineering head Matt Rogers’ blog post:

Eventually, the plan is for us to work together to reinvent products that will help shape the future of the conscious home and bring our shared vision to more and more people around the world. For now though, not much will change. Dropcam products will still be sold online and in stores. And Dropcam customers will still continue to use their Dropcam accounts.

Once the deal closes, we’ll incorporate Dropcam into how we do business at Nest. That includes how we handle everything from customer support to customer privacy. Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest’sprivacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too.

When Google bought Nest, many believed Nest would collect energy-consumption data for possible storage and use by Google. Rogers addressed those fears at the time, and he’s doing something similar today in talking about the Dropcam deal. But even so, privacy questions could well come up anew.

Dropcam’s cameras capture virtually every aspect of the lives of families. The images collected by the cameras are transmitted online to people’s smartphones.

Dropcam has been a high-profile customer of public cloud Amazon Web Services. Once Dropcam becomes a Google company, it will be fascinating to see if the cloud-based infrastructure for Dropcam transfers over to Google’s public cloud, the Google Compute Engine.

Dropcam employees will relocate from their office in San Francisco to Nest’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., Re/code reported.

Last month Dropcam unveiled the $29 Dropcam Tab sensor. Dropcam also announced a “people detection” feature. At the time, Dropcam chief executive Greg Duffy suggested similar features were on the way.

Jordan Novet and Mark Sullivan contributed to this story.