Google expects to be making money off of this somehow. They are willing to go pretty indirect routes to make their money sometimes, like offering android for free in the hopes of driving web search. But the added revenue from search in a place already as connected as Chelsea seems like it would be pretty tiny to me.<p>So if they are doing this to eventually make money (and not as some sort of brand building, "look at us we're so generous" exercise) I can only imagine that they believe the data they will collect from that network will be more valuable than its cost.<p>There are ways to collect metrics from that sort of a network that don't freak me out. But wiring up a place of that size still sounds expensive to me (though that's admittedly just a guess). The data they collect feels like it would have to be pretty valuable to make up for it, and one sort of data that would fit the bill would be the sort of location based data you could collect from wifi. By triangulating signals using multiple routers , it wouldn't surprise me if they could get a pretty good guess as to which apartment that laptop is in. And that sort of data collection really does scare me.<p>Of course, there are more harmless sorts of metrics they could be collecting. And my shaky chain of reasoning based on a random tech crunch story could definitely be off. So I'm less saying this is what they're doing than there is the possibility that this is what they're doing. Please take it with a grain of salt.