> I highly doubt they added a Google account requirement to improve ad targeting.
Ad delivery networks, and google is one of the biggest, have one core business: delivering ads. Everything is setup to make that as big and as solid as possible. Whatever it takes (and we all know how far ad delivery networks will go: almost infinitely far).
Now they ship a piece of hardware, require signing up with an account, and it's not for prolonging / helping their core business? If you believe that, I have a piece of land I want to sell to you, special price.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but Google has an interest in maximizing the number of people who have consistent, reliable, enjoyable internet experiences. If this hardware does not collect data to help them target ads (and that may very well be the case), but causes more eyeballs to spend more time online where they will find Google-hosted ads, it helps their core business AND the customer.
Believe it or not there are a lot of teams at Google that don't think about ads. I worked on Geo for over three years and had plenty of discussions about how various things should work, and ads never came up. (There was one case where we pushed pointless login requirements on the user, gating Zagat reviews behind a G+ login, and I (along with many others) argued against it.) Like I said, I'm not on the OnHub team, but knowing how these sorts of things work my educated guess is that they did some market research and found that the best way to have the best UX for the median user was to do cloud-based configuration.
On top of which, the privacy policy (linked elsewhere in the comments)_ makes it clear that your actual web browsing data isn't tracked.
At a strategic level, if we make wifi better and people use the internet more, sure, we can show them more ads. Maybe that and/or other strategic concerns are part of why the project got funded in the first place. But the people actually designing the features are probably a disjoint set of people from the ones thinking about that kind of strategy.
Ad delivery networks, and google is one of the biggest, have one core business: delivering ads. Everything is setup to make that as big and as solid as possible. Whatever it takes (and we all know how far ad delivery networks will go: almost infinitely far).
Now they ship a piece of hardware, require signing up with an account, and it's not for prolonging / helping their core business? If you believe that, I have a piece of land I want to sell to you, special price.