“Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,” Google said recently. That doesn’t mean Nest, according to Nest CEO Tony Fadell. But it does mean Google is planning on bringing ads to their other products, and that includes Glass.
Google recently filed a letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) outlining plans to bring ads to “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.” This has caused quite a stir in the tech world and the privacy community. The idea that Google could soon be in our automobiles and household appliances makes some people uncomfortable. To some of us, it’s exciting to think about all of the places where Android can be used. If that means we have to deal with some ads now and again, that’s ok.
What no one is really talking about is the ads on Google Glass. Google specifically mentions glasses in the list of devices that could generate ad revenue for the company. They call this a “possibility” but it seems obvious to us that Glass is going to get ads, and that it will probably happen relatively soon. Google is working on a lot of projects with some pretty lofty goals, but at the end of the day they are still an ad company. They make money by selling user data to ad companies, and by helping ad companies target ads to their particular audience. We should not be surprised to see ads on Glass or Nest or any of their other products or services.
We can take comfort in the fact that Google knows how to serve ads properly. They are good at targeting ads to consumers, which means that the ads you’ll see will probably be relevant to your interests. Google is also pretty straight forward with their privacy policies, especially compared to companies like Facebook that don’t tell their users what they do with their user’s data. Google Glass ads will be as unobtrusive as the ads we see in Google searches. The bottom line is this: stop freaking out about ads.