Eero is now officially part of Amazon and is committed to maintaining the confidentiality of network data.

Amazon's agreement to acquire the Eero meshed Wi-Fi router company has been officially closed, expanding the retail giant's consumer product line. Amazon has not yet announced how much it pays for Eero, and Dave Limp, Senior Vice President of Amazon's Device and Services Program, and Nick Weaver, CEO of Eero, declined to disclose the amount during a brief conversation with me. Edge editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn.

Limp has committed to leaving Eero's privacy policy in force – the one that presumes it to follow your activity on the Internet. "We do not change a word" of Eero's privacy policy, he said, adding that Amazon's plan is to "not change anything" at Eero, apart from "l & rsquo; Addition of resources and maybe a little advice here and there ".

"The company is doing well," said Limp. "Nick and his team are fine. The roadmap is excellent, their customer service is excellent, their engineering is excellent. We will simply keep the team intact. This approach would mirror that of Amazon with the video alarm bell and the ring alarm company, acquired by the company last year and which has been operating more or less independently ever since. (Ring's president, Jamie Siminoff, told me last October that his company was working in an "autonomous zone" of Amazon.)

But doorbells and routers are very different products, and worries that Amazon would use Eero network data in one way or another have multiplied since the announcement of the deal. Obviously, your Wi-Fi router can see all your network traffic and the Eero system in particular relies on a cloud computing service for network optimization and other features. However, Eero is determined to keep this data confidential, Weaver said, who also posted an article on his blog this morning that explicitly promises that Eero will never read the actual network traffic.

Picture of James Bareham / The Verge

"On the contrary, we will simply reinforce our commitment to privacy and security," said Weaver. "We have fairly clear privacy principles that we have used to develop all of our products, which are really the foundation of everything. Those are not going to change. "

These three principles, stated in the blog article, state that customers have a "right to privacy" that includes transparency about the data collected and their control; network diagnostic information will only be collected to improve performance, security and reliability; and that Eero will actively "downplay" the amount of data it can access while processing the collected data with "utmost security".

"I'm an Eero customer," Limp told us. "One of the reasons I used these products even before that [deal]was that I was really impressed and admired for their commitment to confidentiality. "

"People are inviting us to their homes," said Weaver. "I take it very seriously."

Limp said that Amazon had approached Eero about an agreement six months ago, when Amazon launched the "No Frustration Configuration" for smart home devices in the Alexa ecosystem. , which allows Echo products to automatically configure items such as simply connected. Eero was one of the company's launch partners and, working together, Limp realized that Eero's purchase could also accelerate the internal efforts of the smart home. # 39; Amazon.

"We can do a lot with Eero to make the smart home even easier," Limp said. "Our job over the next six to 12 months is to show you some evidence of what we can do."

Amazon today offers a $ 100 rebate on the Eero packages to celebrate the conclusion of the deal. So there is already at least one example of what one of the richest retailers in the world can do.