One of the privacy fears stoked about iRobot years ago was about them "selling maps of your home to the highest bidder" for advertising purposes. E.g., https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of...
The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?
What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.
It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.
The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.
> The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table?
I've no idea about rug pile depth, but I'd have thought a simple link between square footage and location would be a reasonable proxy for that affluency.
A simpler signal: Did I buy the $250 Roomba 105 or the $900 Roomba Max 705?
I'm not sure about that. The wealthiest people I know are also the most careful about where they spend their money.
Maybe so, but the poorest people I know don't buy the most expensive tech toys.
I mean, their teenage kids certainly lobby for them, at least as far as iPhones go...
Sure, but a simple address database seems like a lot easier way to get there than robots roving around houses with LIDAR?
Not sure that works though for flogging, say, client IP to affluency data to advertisers, unless they can already reliably pinpoint the client IP to an address (which for all I know, maybe they can).
Did Roomba ever use lidar? I thought their mapping feature was a camera pointing to the celling which is bringing in much richer data than lidar.
Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.
The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.
When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.
I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.
Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.
I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.
Nothing to hide, huh
I don't get this, so you're saying than they can and do sell maps of your home to the highest bidder. But... it's actually overblown, even though they're doing exactly what people were concerned they were doing?
It's MY home! I don't want anybody filming it or recording it or selling maps of it. Full stop!
No: I did not say that they sell maps of anyone's home.
They floated the idea of "shar[ing] maps for free" with other companies in a Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-irobot-strategy-idUSKBN1A... I am skeptical it ever happened.
> [iRobot CEO] Angle said iRobot would not sharing data [sic] without its customers' permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.
The "sharing data" here meant sharing data with other brands' smart home devices but appears misinterpreted as "sharing data with advertisers/data brokers/etc." Say Sonos wanted to make a hi-fi system that optimized audio to your room layout based on Roomba's map.
Upon careful re-reading of the article, I think what the CEO was saying was that they were pursuing becoming the spatial backend for Alexa / Google Home / HomeKit, but the journalist wrote Amazon / Google / Apple, which makes it seem more about advertising data collection than about smart home technology.
(Evidence that this is the correct interpretation: Facebook, despite being a giant data harvesting and advertising operation, was not listed as a potential partner, because they do not have a smart home platform.)
Would the US security leviathan give away other people’s money for highly current floor plans of every residence in the country just on the 1-in-a-million chance they decide to kick in your door and shoot your dog? Probably.
You’re looking at this from a point where the only piece of information about you out there is the data collected by the roomba. In reality, every sensible data broker would just add that signal to your already verbose profile and feed it to a model to determine the stuff you’re likely to buy… or would trigger you to generate engagement or whatever is needed.
The privacy danger here is not the one data point, it’s the unknown amount of other parties who will mix and match it with more data.
With GDPR, I’ve been requesting copies of my telemetry from various corps and it’s amazing the kind of stuff they collect. Did you know kindle records very time you tap on the screen (even outside buttons), in addition to what you read and highlight and pages you spend time on? Now add to that your smart tv’s insights about you and your robot vacuum cleaner … you see now this all grows out of control.