Blackmail for one: "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....". That will work on some people, discovering extramarital affairs, or proving you know intimate details about the inside of someone's house, along with threat of physical violence will work on others. You just need to be sufficiently creative. You can parlay the successes from one target to the next: "I can get both of you divorced unless you install the rootkit on your work's network"
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but when people are having sexy time, they are not really likely to be running the roomba. Having that thing running is the opposite of sexy. When the thing is parked on the base station, it is facing the wall. So exactly how frequently do people think a roomba is running to be capturing all of this explicit footage?
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Yes, that's deliberately missing the point of what was said though. We know the vacuum is using the camera (when equipped) while the unit is running. Go back and re-read what I wrote to see why this is not the same thing.
The article discusses it photographing people exposed on the toilet, and employees sharing the images for lulz. I think that does refute your position that people wouldn't be in compromising positions in front of their vacuum.
> they are not really likely to be running the roomba.
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Maybe read the comment I was replying to before replying with something unrealted? "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....".
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
Its a numbers game, and what I described is just a sketch. Combine it with geo-location: select all roombas within 50mi of washington, DC and run all these various playbooks on it, eventually you'll find something.
Fair. I was combining multiple subthreads when replying, and that wasn't fair.