It's worth noting: Her "thing" isn't that data is being collected per se, it's that such data is often used against us. So while it's easy to rationalize it with "I've nothing to hide", the Amazons of the world are not countering with "We've only your best interests in mind, certainly not our own."
That is, the relationship is asymmetrical, to put it kindly.
I was briefly in the "I've nothing to hide" camp. To put it more concretely, I didn't actually believe it, but I couldn't pinpoint what's wrong with it.
What did it for me is manipulation - everyone can be manipulated with enough knowledge and effort, regardless of how smart they think they are. If you think that you're environment and what you see doesn't affect you, you're just plain lying to yourself. Collecting all this data massively increases the knowledge and reduces the effort necessary for those companies to manipulate you. Manipulate you to buy stuff. Manipulate you to engage, a.k.a. give your time away to make them money and so on.
That's the crux of surveillance capitalism. You're the product and eventually its victim.
Having read the book mentioned, I'd take it a step further and frame the current Gov v Big Tech struggles as Gov realizing that it's losing its grip on control (to Big Tech). So while it might be framed in other ways, ultimately Gov doesn't want to lose its status quo powers.
"You're the product" doesn't really give the vibe I want it to. It sounds like someone is making money off of you, which is true, but it doesn't convey the "at your own expense" part. Even by simple things as better targeting, but eventually as main goals or side-effects of better ML/AI, you're manipulated to spend more, to feel worse about yourself so you spend more and so on. There was recently another article about "insight porn". If someone wants your attention and time, that's another way to take it. The better you know someone, the better you can convince them to give you money and time. So whether you're the product or not, you're paying for it.
Not only that, but this stuff doesn't need to be 100% effective for it to have massive consequences. If amazon can use data about people to swing 5% of votes, the vast majority of politicians would give them pretty much anything in their power.
I think using arguments like "Amazon swinging votes" is bad, since it's easily countered with "Amazon is not interested in political elections". Amazon doing whatever they can to take more and more money from you, way beyond your means? Americans (figuratively, some) are already up to their eyeballs in debt. Amazon being able to make it much worse is already a huge drain on society. "A boring dystopia".
It would be a massive oversight to claim "Amazon is not interested in political elections". Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a reason. Influencing politics is part of the way they take your money. Manufactured consent, political suppression, corporate lobbying, these are all things that every single Fortune 100 company is engaging in heavily at this point.
I have a couple of Roombas, but I'm glad I still have older non-mapping, non-internet connected ones. I got them because I didn't want to have to rely on some app that could get discontinued or have to deal with Wifi. I never through Roomba would get acquired like this.
Looks like I'll have to switch to a different brand when they break (or try to keep them going, years ago I saw something about people rebuilding the Roomba gearbox with metal gears instead of plastic).
Yeah. :/ Well, I suppose I'll have to consider if one of the two "smart" devices needs to go, then.
It's a bit disturbing just how much you can tell about a house from the floorplan alone, much less if you've set out to use the camera for data collection. I wasn't a huge fan of iRobot's data collection, but now that it'll be going to Amazon, ugh.
This is just the end point for any modern gadget. To work against you, to collect data to be used to break your will and make you spend more money to the profit of a handful of big tech companies. Such utopia. Much wow!
In addiction to the stats in the register article, apparently principals of schools that use one of the surveillance platforms are routinely sent copies of sexts that minors sent from personal devices. (Can’t find the quote at the moment…).
Spyware on school chromebooks are snooping SMS on undisclosed models of phones if you use the chromebook USB port to charge the phone (even after school hours).
Roborock have a better privacy story, but how long it stays that way would be pure speculation. It might possibly become a selling point, much like Apple did [in the past].
> "One such demographic that seems to often run into trouble when using Valetudo is apple users. (I know, right?) Specifically, those fully invested into the Apple Ecosystem and way of life."
I have macs and iPhone - so is this some technical issue with the hardware or a snark on (some) people's attitude?
The regular old Roomba has a bumper on the front as the only sensor. There's no camera. Some models have LIDAR but that's not able to tell the difference between types of obstacles (like knowing a floor is covered in toys as the article suggests).
This is dishonest "journalism". Amazon might be evil and is out to get as much data on you as possible, but let's be real about what is possible.
Modern version do indeed map out your house. No cameras needed.
How do I know this? The app associated with our roomba shows the map it's created of our house. And its incredibly accurate, especially since it encourages us to tag spaces in order to set up intelligent vacuuming schedules (i.e. less in the laundry room, more in the kitchen/dining rooms).
It's even smart enough to identify temporary obstacles (like toys) and permanent obstacles.
I don't deny that even the basic model can figure out the layout of your house.
It can't determine materials. The lidar can't really do that either. Even if it could, whether you buy Charmin or generic toilet paper on Amazon is a better signal of your wealth anyway. Honestly just buying a Roomba is a pretty good signal that you have some money to burn but not so much that you can hire a maid.
Honestly, this is spoken like someone who has never used a robotic vacuum. Unless you vacuum your house daily, it helps your house look a whole lot better. Visible dirt on the floor has a bigger impact on the look (and frankly hygiene) your house than you might imagine. And even if you do vacuum your house daily, the robotic vacuum will save you hours of time every week.
That said, if you don't care about visible dirt on your floors, perhaps you're right, it won't improve your life.
My wife bought a Roomba a few years ago. The thing is noisy, and as it bumps around the room like a blind man it frequently gets stuck in a corner or under a chair, or ingests a shoelace from a shoe that someone took off near the front door and then calls for help.
I don't vacuum every day, but do it often enough with a standard canister vac. It takes a few minutes per room, and then it's done. I can also use the vacuum to get cobwebs out of the wall corners and along the ceiling. I can use it to get dust off of other surfaces. I can use it to vacuum out my car. It's a really nice vacuum, quiet, with a powerful suction, HEPA filter, and it cost less than all but the lowest-tier Roomba.
> The j7 and j7+ model, available only from iRobot in September 2021, debuted PrecisionVision
Yeah, they have cameras in 'em - they advertise being able to detect pet poop, a material.
> Honestly just buying a Roomba is a pretty good signal that you have some money to burn but not so much that you can hire a maid.
Dismissive and also untrue. Roombas save time by spending a relatively small amount of money - about the same amount of money you'd spend on a good vacuum.
The past isn't exactly an indicator of the future, though. Competition like Roborock's vacuums are laden with cameras and can do full object categorization, including furniture type and layout, but also what's lying around anywhere up to waist height. Mine has detected shoes, cables, power strips, pets, clothes, toys and so on–that is pretty useful data and tells you A LOT about the house and its owner–pretty easy to imagine them eventually detecting the brand of the shoe and how worn it is or something.
If Roomba isn't working on something like this, given the competition is clearly much further ahead, I'd be completely surprised.
Other posters have pointed out that newer high-end $1000 Roombas do have cameras and some of those features you mention, but they make up a small portion of the Roomba fleet. The article is suggesting Amazon bought iRobot for access to that tiny amount of data. There's just no way that's the primary motivator. It makes so much more sense to think about this acquisition from the "consolidating household smart-device offerings under the Alexa brand" perspective.
I don't disagree, but I see it as more of a forward-looking acquisition, not a backwards looking one. Sure, they don't have the data now but It's easy to imagine Amazon killing off the old basic models in the future and selling the data-gathering camera-enabled ones at a loss, to kill off the competition and get much larger market share, once it's acquired the company. Why wouldn't they?
The name Proteus must be a reference to Player Piano by Vonnegut. The main character, Paul Proteus, oversees a large industrial facility in a world where largely all work has been automated away.
Are there any servers and firmware that I can use to replace the software on my Roomba?
I spent nearly $1k on my Roomba. As a single person with a dog, it helps me a lot. My allergies aren't nearly as bad, I don't have to vacuum by hand nearly as much. I liked that with the map the bot was a lot smarter and didn't bump into or damage my things.
I feel like by selling to a company like Amazon that the rug is being pulled out from beneath me. I am truly disappointed in this move and all the people involved.
What does "revoke its IP address" even mean? Do you mean have it return 0.0.0.0 for all *.roomba.com domains? How would that solve anything? I suspect it'll actually make the Roomba not work at all.
Do roombas need WiFi access or do they use their own whispernet-like mobile data connection? I fear the day when appliances will connect to the internet through their own means.
With the Neato, it can still be used, but you'd lose all of the mapping features in the app. It'd take away no-go zones, which are tremendously helpful in making these useful in a lot of homes.
I think it just means preventing it from being on the wifi at all (revoking local IP address) which would definitely kill anything that requires internet access.
I have a Dreame Z10 that's self emptying and has lidar/vision to avoid bumping (and it works well!). I've replaced the firmware with Valetudo so I've got full, local control with no cloud at all.
This is the model I bought as well. Was only $500 as of a few weeks ago, which is unbeatable for self-emptying with LIDAR. The rooting/Valetudo install process was super easy. Now it’s on a VLAN with no internet access.
> I feel like by selling to a company like Amazon that the rug is being pulled out from beneath me. I am truly disappointed in this move and all the people involved.
How so? What promises were made by iRoomba when you bought it about their intent (or not) to sell the company? How is this sale tangibly affecting you?
This feels like a gross overreaction that's typical of online statements to garner as much of a reaction from other readers as possible.
I don't care that they're selling. I do care, in this case, that they're selling to a company that will use this data for non-diagnostics and non-robot functionality. That's why I said it feels like having the rug pulled out from under me.
> What promises were made by iRoomba when you bought it about their intent (or not) to sell the company
Pretty explicit ones about not selling a map of my house.
> How is this sale tangibly affecting you?
I already explained this, it's unclear why you're asking again.
> This feels like a gross overreaction that's typical of online statements to garner as much of a reaction from other readers as possible.
I mean, you didn't even bother reading up on the promises Roomba has made to end users, Amazon's fairly explicit rejection of in-home privacy, and you're scolding me for sounding reactive.
I didn't ask for the company not to be sold, I said I was disappointed. I didn't say "I'm throwing my device away", I asked if I can run it locally. How much more reserved do you want me to be?
At what point can we just conclude we are living in a dystopia? Seems pertinent to note that one of the hallmarks of many fictional dystopias is that most folks don't even recognize there is a problem!
The article is speculative in nature, despite an obviously unreachable conclusion being the title. As a result I think it's good to be cautious in relying on it for claims, particularly wide ones
There are useful ways of calling things out for being "dystopian" but it can also invoke a clarity that is necessary for narrative fiction, but not necessarily a useful lens for specific real life events. The line between a good shorthand and a thought-terminating cliche can be kind of blurry.
I've never heard of a dystopia you could opt out of by simply not buying a consumer product. 1984 and Brave New World would have been very short books if that was the definition of a dystopia.
the 'don't collect and correlate data about me' tax is getting pretty high. but for now you can still pay it. no plane travel. can't use a cell phone. no online purchases. obviously no rewards systems. no credit cards.
This exactly. Trying to live outside the collection is very difficult.
A few years ago non-smart phones became untenable for use in basic civil society.
More recently, an older smart phone or without face/touch enabled became hard to use.
Recently, in cities like NY, due to QR-ification, going out without a smart phone meant issues getting menus.
Now, the big ones are starting: end of cash, and civil life tracking. The NYC oyster-card equivalent for subways is per-user and sells data, per the ToS. The tap-to-pay subway turnstiles log per-station use (and therefore your travel) for your credit card provider. Many restaurants can’t do cash easily bc the proliferation of Square and what overworked civil servant is going to force mom and pop coffee shops to take cash? The laws on this got hazy a while back anyway. TSA/clearcheck or w/e in airports that use biometrics. Opt out options, besides being inconvenient, label you as what to the TSA? Drivers license photos are auto-sold to CBP facial rec tools and similar. Where is the opt out for that?
This isn’t conspiratorial. it’s just the slow march of clever tech that works well so people who don’t understand the privacy tradeoffs or don’t care buy it, the purchase defines network effects which defines implied user preferences which defines new product choices which defines larger networks… which becomes more and more difficult to opt out of.
If you claim this isn’t happening you don’t understand data eng and tech as a whole. The only thing saving us rn is the data eng part is really hard still.
Sure, at the start. What about once every kind of product has some kind of irrevocable phone home surveillance? Eventually natural turnover would mean even the used market doesn't have much suitable if you want to avoid it.
I'm fairly dubious that there's any useful data here. Square footage, bathroom, bedrooms, and other such stuff is public record. Getting the exact layout of my rooms and furniture doesn't seem to bring any obvious benefit. I guess maybe it can try and identify appliances and such but again not really seeing that as a hugely valuable trove of data.
This article is purely speculation. There nothing back up this claim. I have a Roomba and the map is mediocre at best.
Will they use iRobot's platform to sell their future data collection initiatives? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they didn't need this acquisition to sell newer products that does more mapping and data collection.
People write articles based on some random thought dump
Yes, I was thinking that. It's paywalled for me so I couldn't check if this was based on a leak or anything. I hope this is in the opinion section, because without any sources or leaks, it's just some made up garbage.
> I'm fairly dubious that there's any useful data here.
Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income, which usually is a superset of what you could spend in online purchases. Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes. I expect some more room for Roomba competitors here; certainly I wouldn't want a Amazon branded one even for free.
>Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income
okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
>Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes.
You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has.
"okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?"
- I've never found that ignoring one leak because there's another fixes the pipe.
"You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has."
- 20 years ago who would've thought that TV's would all be capturing your life on record. At best they can check what channel you're watching.
The concerns seem quite plausible: means, motive, and opportunity.
The cable operators have been knowing exactly what channel you are watching for longer than 20 years ago. Think back to how long ago you switched your old analog cable box for a fancy digital one. That's how long. If you're not old enough to know about analog cable boxes, then it has always been true for you.
TVs just introduced the potential for a camera/microphone and the manufacturer receiving that info directly instead of just the cable co.
I think the metaphor here is that "sqft of house is visible" is less a pipe and more of a river?
Random ways I can think of to harvest sqft of your house:
1. Satellite
2. MLS records and/or building plans
3. Don't amazon drivers drive past like every single house at least once a day at this point? could probably do something with that.
Plus, I would be shocked if "amount you spend on amazon per month" doesn't nearly linearly correlate with your income, if that's what they want. Plus doesn't equifax et al literally sell these datasets for this explicit purpose?
I agree in principle that in general I do not want amazon to have an internet-connected LIDAR thingy mucking about my house, but also I struggle to figure out what specific privacy delta is happening here that would be a watershed moment.
TBH still kind of reeling that most TVs have microphones on them with no clearly policy that they're not always listening (vs phones get a lot more scrutiny) and things to that effect. If I were going to try to improve my privacy, moving to a dumb TV is probably something I'd do well before I got rid of my amazon-roomba.
Agreed regarding the fact that this is, at the moment, not the biggest privacy concern.
Of course, I also believe it should be packaged along with the other concerns, because I would argue that each of these capabilities can be called in security terms:
>okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
That tells someone that you can afford to live in that zip code, but it doesn't tell them what you can afford to put in your home. Smart home devices, theoretically, "solve" that "problem".
At least where I live, I can go to an official government website and see exactly what someone’s home is valued at and how much they pay in property taxes just by searching their name and address.
You can get it directly off the MLS in many (US) states. Of course, a staged home may not provide the same quality of data that a view inside a lived-in house would, and if your home hasn't gone up for sale in a long time it may not have anything relevant to say. But the gaps in that dataset feel far smaller than the "I don't own a roomba" gap in this dataset.
It's better to have a DB of the relative size of people's homes than not. You could map it against a DB of their shopping habits. As someone who lives in a condo I can tell you too many furniture manufacturers design their furniture or appliances to be WAYYYY too big. So maybe product managers or portfolio managers can push for SKUs that work for more customer segments.
You may be right that the utility is limited. But in the surveillance economies of Google, Amazon and Facebook more data is better.
Probably. But that doesn't mean that it was the driving force behind the acquisition. Amazon, Google & Apple are all in a battle for the home automation ecosystem. They each want use to use Siri/Alexa/Assistant to control your tv, doorbell, security cams, and more. This seems like another product to add to that ecosystem.
Amazon has shown us that even massive amount of data aren't that useful on their own. They can't even use their information about our online purchases in any meaningful way. Only book recommendations seems to work, but that's also pretty trivial to do.
The plans for my house isn't even secret, you can go to the county and get a copy for the cost to the paper. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but in what sense does the data collected by Roomba help you in anyway? Wifi coverage? Maybe they want to sell me an additional AP?
Just for some conspiratorial fun, what if you converted your house into a meth lab? You're just assuming that Rumba will use collision and move mapping. Pretty crude by tomorrow's standards. What is the evolving difference between innocent search for marketing purposes vs search for illegal use, the consumer of the data product?
I initially thought this, but the technology from competitors like Roborock (I have the S7 maxV) gives me pause: their more modern vacuums not only recognize furniture and layouts, including the chair layout, couch type etc... but they also detect and categorize specific objects you have lying around (it can distinguish shoes, animals, cables, power strips, blankets)... that data seems pretty useful alongside ambient information like temperature inside the house to me. Yes, it's possible to disable these features–but the robot is less useful without them, and it seems unlikely the average user would understand the implication.
If you can figure out what type of shoes[1] someone owns or that they have kids/a dog based on all the toys lying around, there's plenty of ad/behavioral data for free basically.
(I love the Roborock vacuum I have, and would find it hard to give it up even if Amazon acquired them too–it's really good. Thankfully, they have a good privacy focus right now and do state that these features don't share information with the company/stays local to the robot right now).
This is not a new observation, but damn, imagine how much engineering talent and human effort in general is devoted to the end goal of selling more shit.
Well, people want those things. Is there something inherently wrong with that, or do you just find it aesthetically displeasing? To me, this is a bit like complaining that so much talent in painting in the Renaissance went into religious art.
A lot of intrusive and weird functionality comes bundled with products that consumers would not ask for individually. I can easily see someone wanting to by a little vacuum cleaner robot to keep the floors clean while at work - without realizing it has the ability to determine what kind of couch it is bumping into and relaying that information to some server somewhere.
Well sure, once you have a little computer and suite of sensors on the thing there are a lot of incentives to add crap onto it because the marginal costs are so low. Imagine you a PM or mid level exec at Robot Vacuums Inc and you want to advance your career and get a nice bonus. If you can push to get some cool sounding new feature onto the new model you might get promoted or a nice bonus. It probably won't improve sales and the customers don't want that feature but it doesn't hurt sales either so its easy to see how these things prliferate.
That's sort of a warmed over marxist critique. It gets presented at lot as fact without any real evidence and I find that hard to believe. As someone who works adjacent to advertising, it just doesn't seem all that effective. Most ads are basically just informational or reminders that a thing exists anyway.
There are a lot of different products because in advanced economies people have a lot of disposable income and credit is cheap. As such, consumer good proliferate.
I think there's a little more nuance to this. In the engineer's head these things (dogs, shoes, etc) are technical challenges to overcome. It is part of the puzzle that drives engineers. I don't think they're thinking much about how this data can be used to sell more shit and spy on more people (plenty do, but you'll see even here on HN there's plenty of people saying it is "useless" data). So it isn't hard for a PM to say "Hey, can we record that data so we can improve our models" and then a marketer be like "Hey, if we're collecting this data, can we use it to sell more shit?"
It isn't a new observation (same way you get engineers to build weapons), but I'm laying it out more because I think it encourages engineers building stuff to understand how the data they are collecting to solve problems can also be abused (or how whatever you are making can be abused). Like another commenter said, you can turn off the features but they are less useful. Data is a double edged sword.
>If you can figure out what type of shoes[1] someone owns or that they have kids/a dog based on all the toys lying around, there's plenty of ad/behavioral data for free basically.
If you could actually do something useful with it people would give you the info. Like if you could provide shoe recommendations useful to someone they'd take 20 minutes and take pictures of all the shoes they have. But the state of the art is basically "I see you have brown shoes. Here's 1,000 random brown shoes".
On top of that, Amazon knows your address... looking up your home value on Zillow (or whatever the enterprisey equivalent is) is going to be a better proxy than training vacuums to surreptitiously read 401k statemenrs
Isn't speculation half the game in the data business though? You're probably never quite sure what data will be useful in 5-10 years. What's more, if you wait to build the data gathering aparatus until you know what you need you'll almost certainly end up behind someone else.
I think it's probably wise to see most acquisitions these days as a possible long term data play or even as a serendipitous one.
1. Roomba iPad app requires an access to the location services on its first run.
You literally cannot be anything unless it can grab your location. It can be switched off afterwards however. To a fairly reasonable question of "Why is this required" their support replied "Don't like this? Tough life and fuck off." (rephrased for clarity).
2. Roombas have cameras and they refuse to run if these cameras are blocked.
My particular Roomba does not have cameras. It was a deciding factor in my decision of which model is right for me. There are other features that were originally only available on the models with cameras like being able to map a floor plan and then telling Roomba which specifi room to clean. However, a few months ago, a software update provided that feature to my model as well. I have to send it on a specific mapping routine, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing it. I probably won't ever now.
I think the default stance on data collection that we don't necessarily see as "useful data" should be caution. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean much... we are probably missing something (or underestimating future usefulness). Better to take a strict approach now than try to patch things later once the penny drops and we "get it".
This is very much one of those just because you can't think of something does not mean someone else hasn't already. It's more along the lines of you're just not practiced enough.
Sure, technically the data is available at every town hall. But the process of collecting and collating it is vastly different than the process of collecting it from an active mobile sensor kit in every home.
Collecting official records required paid workers scaling linearly with every record, and yields info that is out of date at best (how many small renovations are done without permits?).
In contrast, with these devices, your target pays you to buy and run the device, and it automatically collects live-up-to-the-minute data merely incidental to the standard operation of the device.
Car analogy: Police can technically observe every speeding incident and issue tickets, but it scales only with the hours worked. Change that to collecting data from every car's internal sensors (engine RPM, gear, wheel speed, GPS location, etc.) and issuing tickets for every infraction. Most of us would get five tickets from the first commute vs likely going more than five years without one.
Technically the exact same data availability, but the process of collecting it has insanely different results.
If your place was listed on Zillow/Redfin/Streeteasy/etc then they already have a detailed floorplan. Idk what they are going to learn about where you put your couch.
What does your house look like. What items are in your house (the j- models of Roombas include cameras for object identification). These give Amazon additional leverage in building a customized marketing campaign to your eyeballs.
This seems dubious. Having a in-market consumer brand with millions of customers is much more valuable than being able to get X% better at targeted recommendations.
> what's the downside to my home automation knowing
Nothing. But, it's not just your home automation. It's the biggest retailers (and one of the bigger ad brokers) in the world knowing the layout of your house, including images of objects in your house if you have a newer version.
So, really, it depends on how comfortable you are with Amazon having all that data on you for the secondary purpose of bringing their marketing power to bear against you.
Even if they don't today - if all image recognition is done on the machine (which is frankly unlikely) - nothing stops a software update from changing this.
That's one of the boons of technology that's also a bust. There's no technological barriers to changing how a product behaves.
My guess is Amazon could easily figure out the information a roomba could provide without it (sq ft, etc) which makes me think the title of this article is false.
https://www.vacuumsguide.com/privacy-robot-vacuum-cleaners/
This was already on the radar 5 years ago. Pretty useful data for companies like Ikea to know how people fill their spaces. I am curious if other data is sucked up (now or in the near future). Bluetooth devices in the same room? Wifi SSIDs for precise location?
All potentially useful data for a company like Amazon.
They should have done a deal with Xiaomi or one of the other Chinese brands instead. They're honestly light-years ahead with indoor mapping & navigation.
I bought a top-of-the-line Roomba when I moved to London a few years ago and it's honestly primitive by comparison to even a mid-range Xiaomi robot vac.
> They should have done a deal with Xiaomi or one of the other Chinese brands instead.
Now this is quite a bad take. 100% those Chinese brands are working side step with the military.
Remember, they have no qualms about violating human rights. Marxism's conundrum is that there is no difference between all humans being equal vs not important.
Honestly, Amazon having the floorplan to my house concerns me far more than the PLA having it. If a state actor wanted the floorplan to my house, they don't need a backdoor to my robot vac to find it out.
Amazon wants to provide total home automation solutions: Ring/Blink for security and doorbells and lighting, Alexa for automation, etc. At one point they even recommended Alexa as the glass break sensor for the Ring Alarm, although they eventually made a standalone device.
"Alexa, vacuum the living room" is a nice feature and they can provide that by integrating with Roomba.
Home mapping is not as valuable as that kind of integration, and I seriously doubt that home mapping is why Amazon is doing this.
If you have a roomba, I would think you could block its internet access on your router via its mac address.
But for people with Comcast, I wonder if blocked if it could access what I call the "secret wide-open Concast Router" every Comcast Customer has. Sure there are ways around that.
I had always thought Amazon already owned iRobot. It matches Amazon's existing smart home product line and has a lot of advertisements on Amazon. Speaking so confidently about this being some gather as much data from your home possible play feels like a way of getting clicks via perpetuating the "big tech bad" narrative.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
It's worth noting: Her "thing" isn't that data is being collected per se, it's that such data is often used against us. So while it's easy to rationalize it with "I've nothing to hide", the Amazons of the world are not countering with "We've only your best interests in mind, certainly not our own."
That is, the relationship is asymmetrical, to put it kindly.
What did it for me is manipulation - everyone can be manipulated with enough knowledge and effort, regardless of how smart they think they are. If you think that you're environment and what you see doesn't affect you, you're just plain lying to yourself. Collecting all this data massively increases the knowledge and reduces the effort necessary for those companies to manipulate you. Manipulate you to buy stuff. Manipulate you to engage, a.k.a. give your time away to make them money and so on.
Having read the book mentioned, I'd take it a step further and frame the current Gov v Big Tech struggles as Gov realizing that it's losing its grip on control (to Big Tech). So while it might be framed in other ways, ultimately Gov doesn't want to lose its status quo powers.
Looks like I'll have to switch to a different brand when they break (or try to keep them going, years ago I saw something about people rebuilding the Roomba gearbox with metal gears instead of plastic).
Maybe? They've already done that:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16538834/amazon-key-in-h...
It's a bit disturbing just how much you can tell about a house from the floorplan alone, much less if you've set out to use the camera for data collection. I wasn't a huge fan of iRobot's data collection, but now that it'll be going to Amazon, ugh.
This is just the end point for any modern gadget. To work against you, to collect data to be used to break your will and make you spend more money to the profit of a handful of big tech companies. Such utopia. Much wow!
Yup once data is out there, you should assume it will get into the hands of bad actors.
'Having nothing to hide' from the current data collector doesn't mean that there aren't things you'd want to hide from other parties.
No idea what Amazon will do with the video feeds when they get their hands on this particular surveillance platform.
Apparently, all sorts of surveillance that I thought was illegal has been normalized by covid:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/cdt_school_surveillan...
In addiction to the stats in the register article, apparently principals of schools that use one of the surveillance platforms are routinely sent copies of sexts that minors sent from personal devices. (Can’t find the quote at the moment…).
Spyware on school chromebooks are snooping SMS on undisclosed models of phones if you use the chromebook USB port to charge the phone (even after school hours).
> "One such demographic that seems to often run into trouble when using Valetudo is apple users. (I know, right?) Specifically, those fully invested into the Apple Ecosystem and way of life."
I have macs and iPhone - so is this some technical issue with the hardware or a snark on (some) people's attitude?
This is dishonest "journalism". Amazon might be evil and is out to get as much data on you as possible, but let's be real about what is possible.
How do I know this? The app associated with our roomba shows the map it's created of our house. And its incredibly accurate, especially since it encourages us to tag spaces in order to set up intelligent vacuuming schedules (i.e. less in the laundry room, more in the kitchen/dining rooms).
It's even smart enough to identify temporary obstacles (like toys) and permanent obstacles.
It can't determine materials. The lidar can't really do that either. Even if it could, whether you buy Charmin or generic toilet paper on Amazon is a better signal of your wealth anyway. Honestly just buying a Roomba is a pretty good signal that you have some money to burn but not so much that you can hire a maid.
The article is just FUD
Or you're a sucker for gadgets that are sold at high margins and ultimately don't really improve anything in your life.
That said, if you don't care about visible dirt on your floors, perhaps you're right, it won't improve your life.
I don't vacuum every day, but do it often enough with a standard canister vac. It takes a few minutes per room, and then it's done. I can also use the vacuum to get cobwebs out of the wall corners and along the ceiling. I can use it to get dust off of other surfaces. I can use it to vacuum out my car. It's a really nice vacuum, quiet, with a powerful suction, HEPA filter, and it cost less than all but the lowest-tier Roomba.
Yeah, they have cameras in 'em - they advertise being able to detect pet poop, a material.
> Honestly just buying a Roomba is a pretty good signal that you have some money to burn but not so much that you can hire a maid.
Dismissive and also untrue. Roombas save time by spending a relatively small amount of money - about the same amount of money you'd spend on a good vacuum.
If Roomba isn't working on something like this, given the competition is clearly much further ahead, I'd be completely surprised.
I spent nearly $1k on my Roomba. As a single person with a dog, it helps me a lot. My allergies aren't nearly as bad, I don't have to vacuum by hand nearly as much. I liked that with the map the bot was a lot smarter and didn't bump into or damage my things.
I feel like by selling to a company like Amazon that the rug is being pulled out from beneath me. I am truly disappointed in this move and all the people involved.
https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo
How so? What promises were made by iRoomba when you bought it about their intent (or not) to sell the company? How is this sale tangibly affecting you?
This feels like a gross overreaction that's typical of online statements to garner as much of a reaction from other readers as possible.
> What promises were made by iRoomba when you bought it about their intent (or not) to sell the company
https://homesupport.irobot.com/s/article/964
Pretty explicit ones about not selling a map of my house.
> How is this sale tangibly affecting you?
I already explained this, it's unclear why you're asking again.
> This feels like a gross overreaction that's typical of online statements to garner as much of a reaction from other readers as possible.
I mean, you didn't even bother reading up on the promises Roomba has made to end users, Amazon's fairly explicit rejection of in-home privacy, and you're scolding me for sounding reactive.
I didn't ask for the company not to be sold, I said I was disappointed. I didn't say "I'm throwing my device away", I asked if I can run it locally. How much more reserved do you want me to be?
A few years ago non-smart phones became untenable for use in basic civil society.
More recently, an older smart phone or without face/touch enabled became hard to use.
Recently, in cities like NY, due to QR-ification, going out without a smart phone meant issues getting menus.
Now, the big ones are starting: end of cash, and civil life tracking. The NYC oyster-card equivalent for subways is per-user and sells data, per the ToS. The tap-to-pay subway turnstiles log per-station use (and therefore your travel) for your credit card provider. Many restaurants can’t do cash easily bc the proliferation of Square and what overworked civil servant is going to force mom and pop coffee shops to take cash? The laws on this got hazy a while back anyway. TSA/clearcheck or w/e in airports that use biometrics. Opt out options, besides being inconvenient, label you as what to the TSA? Drivers license photos are auto-sold to CBP facial rec tools and similar. Where is the opt out for that?
This isn’t conspiratorial. it’s just the slow march of clever tech that works well so people who don’t understand the privacy tradeoffs or don’t care buy it, the purchase defines network effects which defines implied user preferences which defines new product choices which defines larger networks… which becomes more and more difficult to opt out of.
If you claim this isn’t happening you don’t understand data eng and tech as a whole. The only thing saving us rn is the data eng part is really hard still.
Will they use iRobot's platform to sell their future data collection initiatives? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they didn't need this acquisition to sell newer products that does more mapping and data collection.
People write articles based on some random thought dump
Yes, I was thinking that. It's paywalled for me so I couldn't check if this was based on a leak or anything. I hope this is in the opinion section, because without any sources or leaks, it's just some made up garbage.
Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income, which usually is a superset of what you could spend in online purchases. Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes. I expect some more room for Roomba competitors here; certainly I wouldn't want a Amazon branded one even for free.
okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
>Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes.
You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has.
"okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?"
- I've never found that ignoring one leak because there's another fixes the pipe.
"You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has."
- 20 years ago who would've thought that TV's would all be capturing your life on record. At best they can check what channel you're watching.
The concerns seem quite plausible: means, motive, and opportunity.
TVs just introduced the potential for a camera/microphone and the manufacturer receiving that info directly instead of just the cable co.
Random ways I can think of to harvest sqft of your house:
1. Satellite
2. MLS records and/or building plans
3. Don't amazon drivers drive past like every single house at least once a day at this point? could probably do something with that.
Plus, I would be shocked if "amount you spend on amazon per month" doesn't nearly linearly correlate with your income, if that's what they want. Plus doesn't equifax et al literally sell these datasets for this explicit purpose?
I agree in principle that in general I do not want amazon to have an internet-connected LIDAR thingy mucking about my house, but also I struggle to figure out what specific privacy delta is happening here that would be a watershed moment.
TBH still kind of reeling that most TVs have microphones on them with no clearly policy that they're not always listening (vs phones get a lot more scrutiny) and things to that effect. If I were going to try to improve my privacy, moving to a dumb TV is probably something I'd do well before I got rid of my amazon-roomba.
violations of the principle of least privilege
Which would be much better, as that give you data on everyone, not just those owning Roombas.
That tells someone that you can afford to live in that zip code, but it doesn't tell them what you can afford to put in your home. Smart home devices, theoretically, "solve" that "problem".
aren't Credit Reporting companies already selling that data?
They could hire Roomba vacuum drone pilots for like $2 an hour!
They already have brilliant insights like, "you buy robot vacuums or accessories for them"? Hmm, maybe we should be in this space.
Reality is pretty boring.
You may be right that the utility is limited. But in the surveillance economies of Google, Amazon and Facebook more data is better.
Of course, but is it better to have a DB of the relative size of peoples’ homes—or $1.7 billion?
The plans for my house isn't even secret, you can go to the county and get a copy for the cost to the paper. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but in what sense does the data collected by Roomba help you in anyway? Wifi coverage? Maybe they want to sell me an additional AP?
If you can figure out what type of shoes[1] someone owns or that they have kids/a dog based on all the toys lying around, there's plenty of ad/behavioral data for free basically.
(I love the Roborock vacuum I have, and would find it hard to give it up even if Amazon acquired them too–it's really good. Thankfully, they have a good privacy focus right now and do state that these features don't share information with the company/stays local to the robot right now).
[1] https://twitter.com/ow/status/1555588525982363648
There are a lot of different products because in advanced economies people have a lot of disposable income and credit is cheap. As such, consumer good proliferate.
It isn't a new observation (same way you get engineers to build weapons), but I'm laying it out more because I think it encourages engineers building stuff to understand how the data they are collecting to solve problems can also be abused (or how whatever you are making can be abused). Like another commenter said, you can turn off the features but they are less useful. Data is a double edged sword.
If you could actually do something useful with it people would give you the info. Like if you could provide shoe recommendations useful to someone they'd take 20 minutes and take pictures of all the shoes they have. But the state of the art is basically "I see you have brown shoes. Here's 1,000 random brown shoes".
Heck, if they already have access to your Amazon purchases and the Roomba model you own they probably have a good idea of your income bracket.
I think it's probably wise to see most acquisitions these days as a possible long term data play or even as a serendipitous one.
You literally cannot be anything unless it can grab your location. It can be switched off afterwards however. To a fairly reasonable question of "Why is this required" their support replied "Don't like this? Tough life and fuck off." (rephrased for clarity).
2. Roombas have cameras and they refuse to run if these cameras are blocked.
My particular Roomba does not have cameras. It was a deciding factor in my decision of which model is right for me. There are other features that were originally only available on the models with cameras like being able to map a floor plan and then telling Roomba which specifi room to clean. However, a few months ago, a software update provided that feature to my model as well. I have to send it on a specific mapping routine, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing it. I probably won't ever now.
Collecting official records required paid workers scaling linearly with every record, and yields info that is out of date at best (how many small renovations are done without permits?).
In contrast, with these devices, your target pays you to buy and run the device, and it automatically collects live-up-to-the-minute data merely incidental to the standard operation of the device.
Car analogy: Police can technically observe every speeding incident and issue tickets, but it scales only with the hours worked. Change that to collecting data from every car's internal sensors (engine RPM, gear, wheel speed, GPS location, etc.) and issuing tickets for every infraction. Most of us would get five tickets from the first commute vs likely going more than five years without one.
Technically the exact same data availability, but the process of collecting it has insanely different results.
What does your house look like. What items are in your house (the j- models of Roombas include cameras for object identification). These give Amazon additional leverage in building a customized marketing campaign to your eyeballs.
More highly targeted data about a consumer will never hurt an advertiser.
what's the downside to my home automation knowing that my kitchen is next to my living room?
Nothing. But, it's not just your home automation. It's the biggest retailers (and one of the bigger ad brokers) in the world knowing the layout of your house, including images of objects in your house if you have a newer version.
So, really, it depends on how comfortable you are with Amazon having all that data on you for the secondary purpose of bringing their marketing power to bear against you.
is there any evidence that roombas actually collect this sort of data?
That's one of the boons of technology that's also a bust. There's no technological barriers to changing how a product behaves.
What’s cool, privacy stuff aside, I can remote control navigate my house with its camera.
So I think it makes sense for Roomba to be part of Amazon’s Ring home security most.
Way more practical than that giant dumb robot thing they made called Astro.
Eventually using sensors to check for floods, motion, oddities, room temperature, etc… all while vacuuming on routine.
I bought a top-of-the-line Roomba when I moved to London a few years ago and it's honestly primitive by comparison to even a mid-range Xiaomi robot vac.
Now this is quite a bad take. 100% those Chinese brands are working side step with the military.
Remember, they have no qualms about violating human rights. Marxism's conundrum is that there is no difference between all humans being equal vs not important.
Is there a blog / news site that covers sensors in consumer items and future sensor development?
"Alexa, vacuum the living room" is a nice feature and they can provide that by integrating with Roomba.
Home mapping is not as valuable as that kind of integration, and I seriously doubt that home mapping is why Amazon is doing this.
https://www.amazon.com/Neato-Robotics/dp/B01MXI58Y7
But for people with Comcast, I wonder if blocked if it could access what I call the "secret wide-open Concast Router" every Comcast Customer has. Sure there are ways around that.
Amazon bought a brand, that's it.
Would you buy an Amazon branded robot with Alexa that roams around your house 24/7? No. Would you buy a Roomba that ... wait, you have one already.
This is obviously a piece of Amazon's plan to dominate the smart home market.
My current roombas support alexa integration. I didn’t enable it and do not want it.
Assuming I can’t figure out how to make the current ones go without wifi, I’ll sell them and go with some hackable Chinese brand.