I've purposely avoided writing about this over the last twenty-four hours, but Nilay Patel's piece for The Verge strikes me as balanced and sane.

The question of trust is perhaps most important of all. Fadell once described the Nest thermostat to me as nothing more than an on / off switch with a lot of nuance — nuance gained by collecting huge amounts of data about your living patterns and energy needs. Adding that data to Google's formidable collection of information about nearly everyone who uses the internet struck immediate fears with privacy advocates and a growing base of skeptics who contend Google's ad-supported business model creates an anti-privacy culture.

I remember a conversation I had about a year ago with a smart person who's a fan of both Apple's products and Google's services. I explained the reasons for my mistrust of Google, but he was convinced that 'regular people' wouldn't ever care what was happening to their data, as long as they got free stuff. He might still be right, but twelve months on I get the sense that more and more people are feeling uneasy about the privacy implications of Google's business model.