Almost every router supports some form of remote management (or just put TeamViewer on their machine). Most also support dynamic DNS so you can set up a ping check for the "its down" notification.
Before I bought the Google mesh wifi, I already had android, chrome, project Fi, and Google's DNS (router level) at various levels of my request stack. That's not even counting search, gmail, and calendar. If Google are playing shady games with my network traffic, whatever marginal gain they get from having software on my router is negligible. Especially compared to the awful PR backlash they'd get once somebody hooks some monitoring gear up to their hardware and exposes it.
I agree. I gave that example because I personally use it, but would prefer to move to a self-hosted or inexpensive paid solution. I've always assumed the free version has sufficient business value as a lead-generator for the enterprise version, but there's no reason to assume they don't also monetize usage data.
> I already had android, chrome, project Fi, and Google's DNS ... whatever marginal gain they get from having software on my router is negligible.
That's a totally fair way of looking at it, and I'd probably use Google Wifi with little hesitation if I were you. But this isn't the case for everyone. IMHO tech folks need to be mindful of privacy implications when recommending tech to non-tech folks, because we have the benefit of understanding those implications. FWIW, my immediate family would be displeased if I installed a Google router for them and they later figured out Google's conflict of interest for themselves.
That said, I agree TeamViewer in a position to collect & monetize my usage by nature of being cloud-dependent & closed-source. I'd rather use an open-source self-hosted option. Haven't found a good one yet, but that doesn't mean we should ignore privacy hazards where they can be easily avoided.
"Google Wifi and Nest Wifi devices do not track the websites you visit or collect the content of any traffic on your network."
The name-calling is really not necessary. Why not make your point on its own merits?
The doc[0] you're quoting continues to list a bunch of things they do collect, including some with no opt-out. Way to cherry-pick.
Even the part you quoted does not exclude traffic metadata.
