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Dropcam customers now need to open a Nest account

Dropcam customers now need to open a Nest account

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Nine months after the half-a-billion dollar deal that brought Dropcam to the Google-owned Nest, the two home automation companies are starting to integrate their products. Dropcam customers received an email this week that informed them they now needed to sign up for a Nest account to get the full functionality out of the home-monitoring cameras sold by the San Francisco-based startup. During sign-up, Dropcam customers have to accept a new terms of service agreement and privacy statement.

In a statement to The Verge, Nest said that it made the change "to make it easier for customers to manage all their Nest and Dropcam products." By signing up for a Nest account, customers can log in to both Dropcam and Nest apps using the same password, but there's no combined app yet that allows customers to monitor a range of products. Nest says that forcing Dropcam customers to register with Nest itself is the first step in the eventual product integration it promised in June last year.

The move will make life fractionally easier for people who have both Nest and Dropcam products in their home and regularly forget their passwords, but for people who've been using Dropcam's home-monitoring cameras for five years, it's extra busywork for no new functionality. It's also a chance to tie existing Dropcam customers into Nest's terms of service and privacy agreements, documents that Nest tells The Verge it has updated to include Dropcam.