Nest is becoming very smart because now it can tap into your smartphone to tell if you're home or not. It can also tell when you're about to return home. The big question is, though, why does Nest need to know these things?
When a user steps out of the house, the thermostat will move into "away" mode, and when it realizes that you're near to returning home, the thermostat will then begin to warm things up for your comfort. That's pretty cool from our point of view.
According to the Google owned company, the feature is called Home/Away Assist, and if you want it off, it can be switched off, no problem. However, should it be kept on, it can be both an energy saver and a time saver.
Now, the Home/Away Assist feature is not the only thing that was recently added to Nest via the latest update. Before now, folks living in the same house had to use the same account to control Nest, but now that is no longer the case. Now, users in the same house can have their own accounts and control Nest independent of others.
It made sense for these two features to launch at the same time, because just imagine if the sole account holder steps out while the rest of the family is still at home. It means Nest could automatically go into "Away" mode and that would no doubt become an issue.
Home/Away Assist mode does come off as a potential privacy issue, and we have no doubt some folks will have concerns. However, Nest is saying it does not track where the user goes, but some folks, that might be too difficult to believe.
We should point out that there are other products on the market that uses location tracking in similar ways to how it works with Nest. Still, the company is saying its implementation is much better because it does not rely solely on a single smartphone.
"To guess if you're home, other products use a single phone's location to define a virtual barrier, or geofencing. Then they track your phone to determine when you cross that barrier. But that can lead to mistakes. Geofencing isn't very precise, so a product might think you're home when you're really a couple blocks away.," according to Nest's official blog.
Bear in mind that this feature is not limited just to the Nest thermostat, it is available to all Nest products.