Nest Protect Recall FUD

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has officially announced the recall of the Nest Protect smoke detector. On the commission’s site, the recall notice titled Nest Labs Recalls to Repair Nest Protect Smoke + CO Alarms Due to Failure to Sound Alert states that “consumers should stop using this product unless otherwise instructed.”

It reads as if there are new findings about Nest’s previously announced issues in April. There are not. It reads as if you have to replace the defective product immediately. You do not. There’s a significant amount of confusion—classic FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)—being fanned by the press itself. Reputable outlets like re/code are reporting that “the Nest Wave feature is now being disabled.” It is not—that happened nearly two months ago. Absolutely nothing is new, and nothing has changed since Nest’s announcement about the Protect on April 3, 2014.

There’s enough FUD out there to ensnare everyone. I was caught up in it myself, confused by the safety commission’s notice. When I took to twitter, asking @nest to clarify, they quickly responded, pointing me (and other consumers) to their original notice from April. The commission’s notice just reiterates (and formalizes) the information Nest already shared with consumers.

Nest says there’s no need to discontinue using the device if it’s connected to Wi-Fi so that the Nest Wave feature has been properly disabled. With Nest Wave disabled, Nest reminds us that “the Nest Protect Alarm will continue to perform its essential safety functions, monitoring for increased levels of smoke and CO, and alerting users via local alarms and Nest app alerts (if set up).” In fact, they expect to resume sales of the (presumably updated) product in a few weeks.

We did learn one thing from the commission’s notice, if it’s accurate—estimated sales figures for the Nest Protect. According to the notice, there are nearly half a million Protect devices on the market.

This has been a rough week for Nest. Following the surfacing of SEC documents showing that Google purportedly intends to use devices around your home as advertising vessels, including thermostats, the press and consumers all concluded that Nest thermostats would soon be doing just that. They will not.

Nest’s Tony Fidel states emphatically to re/code that “Nest is being run independently from the rest of Google, with a separate management team, brand and culture. Nest has a paid-for business model, while Google has generally had an ads-supported business model. We have nothing against ads — after all Nest does lots of advertising. We just don’t think ads are right for the Nest user experience.”

Source: re/code