CEO says iRobot will never sell your data
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Wizards of the Coast made a public announcement back in the 90s that they would not reprint cards on the reserved list in Magic: The Gathering. Even though they're now owned by Hasbro, they're still afraid of a lawsuit from collectors and trading shops if they do reprints or functional reprints (because that would drop the value of existing collections, causing material damages).
They toyed with non-playable collector editions for a few years, and then even that was shut down.
Right now, the legal system does not always afford breaches and violations of privacy the level of gravitas that they deserve.
The challenge in this case is assessing the dollar value of a new piece of personal info (room geometry). Perhaps there should be a small floor value (priced in $/byte) for any personal data when assessing damages - it would greatly discourage collecting novel data about users "for future use" or "just because we can".
Edit: "anonymized" data can be discounted based on an expert assessment of how easy it is to de-anonymize.
- Publicly stated that they regret the reserved list, it's a mistake, and its existence hurts the game.
- Implemented a policy that employees are not allowed to publicly discuss the reserved list.
- Released tournament-legal cards from the reserved list in a manner 100% compliant with the terms of the reserved list.
- In response to complaints, strengthen the reserved list policy so such releases are no longer allowed.
This makes no sense to me as a criticism, because (a) the legal situation would be entirely identical if Magic: The Gathering were produced by a single individual, and (b) Wizards is refraining from printing more cards in response to pressure from the collectors.
Maybe I can restate my comment as "This promise is meaningless, but there are meaningful promises they can make that they chose not to, and that is meaningful."
Having it enables getting hacked.
Not selling data enables not having it in the first place, which eliminates the entire failure class of "getting hacked".
NB, and not specific to you, but I'm increasingly cognizant of the general inability (or unwillingness) of people to follow chains of reasoning forward, or in this case and more readily, backwards, to identify likely consequences and/or causal / contributory mechanisms, in even only modestly complex cases.
It gives me a great deal of concern over the creation of an even only modestly complex information infrastructure.
[1] I don't think that is a word but hopefully what I hope it would mean if it were a word is clear :-)
A purchaser looking to woo your clients (and continue to provide your service) rather than exploit your goodwill shouldn't have trouble retaining the majority of the data.
There's no reason to force data deletion, but leaving the choice to customers if they want to trust the purchasing company the way they trusted you prevents a lot of conflicts of interest and abusive behaviors.
> Wouldn't it actually just deter companies interested in acquiring out of interest
> in the acquisition's customer data?
The long held theory here is that the share holder's elect board members to represent their interest in the company, which is notionally the 'value' of their shares, so for the board to be doing the shareholder's bidding they would not allow the CEO to explicitly damage the value of the company by impairing one of its assets with a destruct clause.
As others have pointed out, looking only at the costs associated with a decision to "spend" assets is not what fiduciary responsibility requires.
As a tangent, there's also mechanisms you could use besides something in the bylaws to prevent it -- I don't think you actually need anything but restructuring the contract. (Though, obviously, bylaws or articles would carry more weight.)
[1] I like that phrase!
There are two choices the analysis; 'do nothing' which leaves the business as it is, collecting sensor data from the operation of the robots into aggregated data sets, and 'destruct on sale' which is a promise to delete any and all sensor data collected so that the new owner can not use it.
I am further assuming that at the time of sale the business has two components of value, its 'operational' value which is the annual recurring revenue of its subscribers/users less the cost of managing the revenue, and 'residual' value which consists of company assets such as the physical plant (offices), algorithms or patents, real estate holdings, and data sets.
In the 'do nothing' case we assume that subscription rates ($SUBS) stay the same (so revenue is unchanged) and that the data set accumulated has some value (say $DS)). Using $SUBS as the revenue model, $ASSETS for the stuff that doesn't change in either choice (office, patents) the value generated by the company would be something like:
years * $SUBS + $ASSETS + $DS.
years * ($SUBS + $Delta) + $ASSETS.
So my analysis would say that the 'better' choice is the one that generates more value over time for the company. And given the structure above that depends entirely on one thing, is the value of ($DELTA * years) greater or less than the value of $DS.
Next I'm going to stipulate that the value of $DS has a 'years' component as well since the data set keeps customer data regardless if they are a current customer or not. So the more customers you've had over the years the more value $DS. And using that stipulation I'm going to simplify the analysis to just the comparison of $DELTA and $DS.
Then I'm going to ask can we characterize the size of $DELTA? And I will argue, perhaps unfairly, that $DELTA would consist entirely of people who 'care about privacy.' Then I'm going to look at all of the experiments in tech where the differentiating factor of the product was 'privacy' or 'less tracking' and compare their addressable customer market to the the overall market. (I actually got to 'live' this advocating the privacy features of the Blekko search engine to people)
Then I'm going to argue that while there are many people who will talk about their concerns around privacy and security the number that will change their behavior relative to that concern if astonishingly small. It shouldn't be but there are examples all around of how it is. And based on that argument I'm going to argue that $DELTA is very small, 1 or 2% of the subscriber base at best.
Then I am going to talk about the challenges of developing a dataset like $DS. How difficult it would be for anyone to create such a data set without a way of explicitly running a sensor suite in thousands of homes. And given how hard it is to compete, that someone with sole possession of that data would have a competitive advantage over others who might seek to use it, or might have a salable product based on that data that nobody else could offer. (joke idea: use it to validate square footage numbers in Redfin listings). I would argue that this data set which would be unique in the world would be very valuable, and assert that $DS was >> $DELTA and so the right choice for the company was to keep it.
And in that analysis, if the most value would be maintained by keeping it, then changing the company so that it could not be kept would impair the value of the company and violate the fiduciary duty of the board.
The "business judgement rule" means that boards get a huge amount of latitude in how they run their business, especially absent "disloyalty" to the business (like enriching themselves at the company's expense).
In a 2005 case (re Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation), the Court said "not entitled to any remedy unless the transaction constitutes waste... [that is,] the exchange was so one-sided that no business person of ordinary, sound judgment could conclude that the corporation has received adequate consideration."
Your valuation has all sorts of uncertainties. Is there actually a market for the data? Even if it is from old, proprietary sensors? How comparable are those privacy experiments to a situation in which the sensor package is literally roaming your house 24/7? Is customer interest in privacy increasing (particularly in iRobot's target demographics?) and are there sales/reputational benefits for being one of the first companies to adopt this policy first? Any one of these is enough to ruin your case.
It would have to be something really egregious, like a contract in which the data transfers to the CEO's brother-in-law, for it to be a breach of duty.
* Business Judgement Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
* Dodge v. Ford is where this idea of shareholder profits first comes from. However, look at the discussion under "Significance" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Signif...
* Article by a law prof at UCONN: https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiducia...
Directors are Directors because they represent a big chunk of stock. Billy Bob's VC invests in your company, gets a big chunk of stock and a seat on the board. Even 'outside' directors are often compensated for their time in stock. As a result every board member tends to make their judgments based on whether or not their stock value will go up or down.
Karl Ichan doesn't buy a bunch of stock and get himself on the board just for grins and giggles. No, he expects to wield the managerial power the board has over the CEO to enact policies that will improve the value of the stock he went out and purchased so that he can then sell it for a profit and move on to another company.
As a result discussions at the boardroom level are around "is this good for the stock or not" and in that vein I would do the analysis.
It seems quite interesting as a concept what a company is once it's bought and traded. What, exactly, is the precedence of interests? Is it state-first? Or owner-first? Or maybe a combination of the two?
... or am I just too drunk?
I am not an expert, I've played a part in no more than 10 companies being sold or purchased. In all the cases that I participated it the process involved creating a 'third' company that was essentially wholly owned by the acquiring company, and then that third company 'bought' some or all of the assets (physical or intellectual) of the company being bought. And then the purchased company was typically dissolved after a period of time that would allow for things like contracts or other actions to transpire while the entity existed. At a future point the intermediary company gets absorbed into its parent with a full transfer of all assets and that triggers its own dissolution clause.
The bylaws have always been the controlling documents for who could approve the sale, and how that process would complete. California adds a 'fairness' hearing sometimes[1] which I was told provides some protection against future lawsuits.
Bottom line a company is its employees, contracts, customers, physical property, intellectual property, cash accounts, and financial obligations. The entity or body authorized to sell the company can sell any or all of those pieces.
I recently had a case with one such services. They store personal information that could be very damaging if it got out. SSN, driver's license, name, address, phone, credit card info, etc.
I decided I no-longer needed the service and so I asked to close the account and clear all of my data from their servers and backups. I was particularly interested in the information that could be used for nefarious purposes given a data breach or a sale of the business.
They refused and gave me some bullshit reason.
I moved immediately to arbitration per their own TOS. Within a couple of days they became very responsive and have, in theory, cleared all my info from their service.
And that's the issue. How do you know? They could have lied to me just to get me to drop arbitration. Hard to know how far to pursue something like this. No company should keep information on you that you do not authorize them to keep. A consumer ought to have the right to have any and all traces of their personal data erased from databases with absolute certainty. Privacy ought to supersede everything else.
What if you want Facebook to clear all data related to your account? I don't think that's possible in the US, is it?
And invariably, I hear about that exact data becoming exposed a few months later. It's extraordinarily frustrating that even when you articulate this viscous cycle to them, they still blindly push forward with the same efforts.
This is one of those cases where it is impossible to prove a negative -- one can never prove that the data you gave to Facebook doesn't still exist somewhere, even if they look for it everywhere they can think of. Similarly, the company you entered into arbitration with might have made a good-faith effort to delete your data, but they might not have fully succeeded.
Therefore, one must assume that any data given to any company might somehow survive even if the company attempts to delete it.
I mean hell, at my company we are putting in tools and methods that will allow us to very easily remove data with a single command from our systems should a customer/partner request their data deleted.
There is no way in hell they actually destroyed my sample or my data. They quite rightly knew that they didn't need to convince me of anything or try to hide the fact they were lying.
address-> house size mapping has been done. (I think towns keep that data for tax purposes)
name -> address is a phone book away. (If you've ever bought a property you probably got some welcome mail from companies looking to sell you things)
the address->email address/online presence might be where the new data comes out.
I worked at a company that monitored peoples and businesses power use, on a circuit by circuit basis. This can be really invasive. When my boss went on vacation, his data clearly showed that (we used his house for testing). Our CEO asked his wife why she came home early, she asked how he knew (the garage door and kitchen power... He could keep his toys but not talk about it again.). Another person was wondering if he should talk to his dog walker because he noticed that one walk was really shorter than it should be...
Our sales guys would look at a company they had meeting with roof, to figure out the size and number of AC units, before going to talk to a business.
We really have little privacy anymore.
I've long thought that simply making myself more aware of the actual dollar costs of usage for various things (leaving lights and computers on, etc.) could be a great way to nudge me towards better energy consumption habits (ditto for water usage).
We uploaded data from the box to the cloud once per minute, so you could see your usage. We could give an estimate on daily/monthly/yearly cost. Electric rates can be weird, so businesses we had logic that would try to calculate and alert you when you were reaching a specific dollar figure (or peak period.. some utilities surcharge based on peak usage)
In general we had dashboards and alerts. Restaurants could see if the lights were on after a certain hour (usually closing). A big early win was a place that had electric heaters in the front windows that were on 24/7. It was fun watching the solar panels generate, and see when the clouds go by.
The company moved into hvac control with temperature sensors and monitoring refrigerators and cooking temperatures. Now I think they're selling services to oven companies and such.
Its AC so there is some work to pull the data out (we had a custom board to deal with the 14 channels).
Current transformers are what makes it work. There are some open source solutions are starting to show up that don't require uploading to the cloud. There are "Kill a watt" for single plug monitoring, but they lack logging.
One use for this data would be for the IRS, to help determine square footage to see if it's inline with what's reported for home offices
I found a company that took those public property records and made them searchable online on 1 website. There's a huge difference between finding a phone book in the right area and manually searching by name (you need to have a rough idea of where I live), vs going to the correct county website and searching my name (you still need a rough idea of where I live, but it will be easier since you don't need physical access), vs being able to go to a single website and find out where anyone in the US lives (all I need to know is you're in the US).
"The Roomba 900 Series vacuuming robots capture mapping and navigation information via vSLAM, which stays on the robot. On all WiFi-enabled Roombas, usage data (e.g. how long did it clean, how far did it go, did it encounter any error codes, is it functioning correctly) can be sent to the cloud so it can be shown on the customer's mobile device. Images used for navigation are NOT sent to the cloud."
Have to give them props for being so specific. That being said.. still don't know if I trust them, and I am sitting with my Roomba 960 vacuuming under my feet lol
Maybe I'm just too pessimistic for my own good, but the wording on that still leaves a lot of wiggle room in how it's "images" and "cloud". Not all file formats are images and not all servers are a "cloud".
Could just as well used "data"/"upload" and covered all fronts. "Data used for navigation is not uploaded anywhere".
And I wouldn't quibble about the usage of "cloud". It's generally understood that if the data is sent to a server outside of the customer's control then that's the "cloud".
I do understand the pessimism, especially with all the privacy horror stories you hear out there, but I can say that Colin / iRobot arent playing games with their words when it comes to this.
If anything I would say that there is some good information on the webpage they need to make sure gets out there. I'd also say that they should get out there and talk about their vision for the future more. Colin has talked a lot about his vision of a smart home, and how iRobot can bring a lot to the table by providing users a map of their home that is updated fairly often. As such I think they could get people more excited by not just saying "no we arent selling your data", but by showing the potential. Imagine being able to say "OK google, vacuum all the bedrooms and mop the bathroom", and having it dispatch your roomba and braava. Or saying "Alexa, have you seen the tv remote?" and having it respond "the roomba spotted it inder the couch when cleaning earlier".
(Not necessarily saying this is what is being worked on, again just my impressions I got that Colin / the leadership there is more interested in making cool bots and working to make a true smart home a reality, and willing to let users have access and share the kind of data a mapping robot can bring, and less about becoming a data/ad broker.)
From my end I always add a disclosure about any current and former employers in when I post anything about them because I'd rather just be honest that I may be biased on the subject!
FWIW, I no longer work there, nor do I own any stock - My only interest in defending them is I have great memories of working there, and a lot of friends who are still there! (Again, feel free to take with a grain of salt)
Their own cloud connected app shows a detailed layout of your home's floor plan[0]. The implication of "navigation information via vSLAM, which stays on the robot" suggests that such a floor plan could never be sent to the Roomba App, since it is, that statement is suspect.
Plus the Roomba is updatable over WiFi without user intervention. So even if the above statement is true TODAY, there's no specific reason to believe it will remain true forever. They could push an update tomorrow, start collecting data, and then let you "opt out" if you don't want your intimate personal life shared with anyone who can pay.
> If a user agrees to having their map data viewable on their mobile device, then the map that the Roomba creates during a cleaning job is sent to the cloud where it is processed and simplified to produce a user-friendly map that ultimately appears in the iRobot HOME App.
(This July 24 story corrects paragraph 6 to read "share maps for free with customer consent" instead of "sell maps")
"Angle told Reuters that iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to share its maps for free with customer consent to one or more of the Big Three in the next couple of years. Angle added the company could extract value from those agreements by connecting for free with as many companies as possible to make the device more useful in the home."
Glad to see the backlash. When I read the original story I thought - this seems like a good product to sell to a SWAT team. It's amusing that a company named after the book/film "I, Robot" is the one involved in this controversy.
In my opinion, the market is ripe for a privacy sensitive electronics brand. Personally, I looked into this with phones a few times but just couldn't find the right mftg partner.
We have one. They're called Apple and they're quite successful :D
The book and film or so un-related it is almost an insult to mention them as if they are the same. While a few character names and the three laws come from Asimov the plot of the movie is mostly original work adapted from a screenplay Hardwired by Jeff Vintar completely unlinked to Asimov's stories.
Well, then how about giving it for free because they're forced to or dutifully happy to do so? iRobot until just over one year ago built military and critical robots for the US government, police etc, then they sold the military division to a different entity, but I wonder if they still have ties with the govt.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/irobot-sells-off-mil...
Adding malicious code to such a platform will be just too simple. ...And tempting.
After reading the original article where they casually suggested they'd sell photos from within my home (in the form of maps), I've scrapped the entire concept. I knew the 900 series had better mapping, but I never considered that someone would use that to invade my privacy (and that of my family).
And this article doesn't change that. You cannot put this genie back in the bottle. Now all I wonder is "when" that data would be sold, whereas before it wasn't even something on my mind.
I currently own a 700 series "bump" Roomba. I think I'll stick to "bump" navigation models without WiFi, since clearly the data will get abused.
PS - I am well aware that certain information about my home is public, such as square footage, floor layout, and so on. This is taking that one step further, by selling even the layout and type of furniture I own. Plus the Roomba uses optical cameras, so who knows how far this could go. Particularly if they just switch it on one day and make it "opt out."
If we just sat quietly and did nothing when iRobot seems to be selling our data, then that just opens the door to worse privacy violations.
Sure, there'll be periodic and pointless indignation, but then the vast majority of those complaining will go back to trading their personal information for free stuff.
I hate to sound alarmist, but as our world grows increasingly connected, I tend to be a bit cautious as to why I'm giving up this data and for what benefit. I see stories like this (https://carpeaqua.com/2017/07/07/hack-the-planet/) and wouldn't have thought before that my PayPal accounts or other financial information could be at risk because of an AT&T issue, but some criminal was smart and exploited the weak link here.
I don't have any idea as to how criminals in the future will exploit my personal house data in order to steal from me, but just in case they find a way, I'd rather not offer up that data because "who cares".
Floor plans are quite useful for staging a burglary.
And maybe you live in a much bigger place than I do, but a burglar isn't going to be planning to rob me like they are planning to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. My house isn't that complicated, you don't need to spend much time planning when you can deduce a floor plan pretty quickly. It also isn't like a Roomba created floor plan would have any idea on where in my house the valuables are stored.
You could call me paranoid, but I prefer all data I generate in private to be limited to whom I want to share it with.
If I'm a burglar, it's convenient to map out your house before I burgle you.
There's just no reason pertaining to cleaning floors that the floor plan needs to get saved anywhere. Companies collect data for the purpose of extracting value from it. If they just wanted to make smart devices better, they could have the devices communicate on a closed network without sending data anywhere outside the network.
This isn't thinking like a corporation, nor a hacker. This as an APT, information security-wise.
These kinds of grants of access to private data by consumers for monetization purposes are never, ever constrained to one highly-specific type of data. They want you to grant access to a data gathering CHANNEL. Once that channel is opened, any additional data they figure out how to gather falls under the same agreement you consented to before.
Today, it is room data. Tomorrow, it is dust and pollen collection data.
"So what, who cares, they can have measurements of how much dust and pollen is in my home, lol."
Yeah?
Exactly how much have you worked with the data brokering business? If you've been around the block in that part of the industry for any length of time, you quickly realize that it isn't single individual databases where the real bucks are made. It is novel combinations of datasets giving you a plausible explanation to draw inferences from the data.
Go back to the hypothetical dust and pollen measurement. Suppose the GOP loosens the restrictions on risk-pricing medical insurance plans; as long as an insurer can point to a plausible explanation of pricing factors, they can price it however they want above a baseline, but they don't have to make it easy for you to figure that out. Health insurer uses a study [1] to explain how certain levels of dust and pollen are correlated to X% increases in stress-related costs. They purchase the dataset from iRobot. Slap an X% increase onto your premiums, but you are none the wiser on exactly why, and especially where the substantiating data came from, "because it's a trade secret".
The practically non-existent privacy protections for American consumers is essentially a license to steal from them. The best part is you never have to be told who gave what information about you, and when. All this data gathering started out as a sales exercise only because that is the low-hanging fruit. The real prize is absolute control over all the decisions you will make that matter to the owners.
Me. And not to put too fine a point on it, the people in the market for buying and selling this data.
> Why should I be worried if Amazon knows the distance between my couch and coffee table?
I'm not going to presume to speak for you.
> Isn't our outrage better preserved for when our privacy is truly invaded?
...So don't speak for me when deciding what is an isn't an invasion of privacy.
I find this to be a significant invasion, and so do many other folks, some of whom are giving you possible answers to your question. In a lot of ways, this is no different than people claiming the FB 'true name' policy doesn't matter/is actually a positive. Maybe for them, but not for the former partner of an abusive spouse, or the gay kid in Russia or Alabama.
Don't presume that your tolerance for data leakage is the same as everyone else's.
More generally, the point is that information like this just should be default-private. There is zero reason for me to want information like this to be shared with random third-parties. If iRobot or whomever wants to "enhance the value of their connected devices" with private data about me and/or my possessions, let them approach me and convince me to share it, not just blandly write some bullshit privacy policy and take it from a device I purchased.
I love innovation, new toys, etc. But this rush to sneakily inventory/quantify/spy on me, my home, possessions and relations is awful, and will have creepy outcomes. It won't happen to me, because I won't install this shit in my home or use social media, but it will happen.
Do what you like with your own sense of privacy, but don't presume to speak for anyone else about what a "true invasion" might be.
This is exactly what I am talking about. Do you honestly see no hyperbole in this? Roomba having a map of my floors is no different than a policy that leads to gay kids in Russia being thrown in jail. Things aren't binary. We can deal with them in nuance. Equating these two together weakens your argument against both of them.
yourapostasy's post elsewhere in the thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14876581 ) is worth considering before dismissing these concerns as "hyperbole."
When it comes to Big Data -- and Big Metadata, for that matter -- quantity has a quality all its own. If this type of data weren't valuable, and hence worth safeguarding, there would be no market for it.
When iRobot releases their commercial automatic floor cleaning robot, consider your restricted floor-plans as mapped.
Even today, there's a market eerily similar to the market of videos from hijacked xbox cameras in order to show room contents.
There are lots of other markets I can think of off the top of my head. Don't discount what data can reveal.
I'd like to agree with you, but I'm becoming less sure of that with every day.
For instance, you breezed right past my point (that privacy risks are different for different people) to hammer more on your presumptuous assertion that floor maps don't (or maybe you mean shouldn't) matter to anyone.
However, in this case, I still cannot understand all the negativity still being directed toward iRobot. We know data they're collecting, we know why they're collecting it, and uploading mapping data is opt-in. If any of these things concerns you, can you just not buy it and move on?
More seriously, I see value in iRobot and others hearing loud noise about how stuff like this is not OK to many of us.
- "We" may know this, but I doubt there's a "we also sell your data" sticker on the box, and lots of other people don't.
- If people don't push back, manufacturers will hear that this is acceptable. I'd like this to not be acceptable.
- iRobot may have floated this in order to find out what people thought, but many other companies are much less scrupulous. They need to hear loud and clear that this is not acceptable.
- If loud outcries happen each time some company tries to normalize data grabs like this, they won't be normalized. That's a world I'd like to live in, so I'll keep being loud, thanks.
Full disclosure: I am a former iRobot engineer, and also a big privacy proponent. I also had some feelings about a camera enabled mapping robot when I first learned about the project, but I can tell you that the people there take privacy and data security VERY seriously, and really are trying to respect their customers as much as possible. Unfortunatley the message that iRobot wanted to allow you to share your mapping data if you wanted to for enabling smart home applications got spun pretty quickly into "iRobot wants to sell your data!")
The only reason I can think of is that square footage can be an indicator of income class.
Doesn't really work... they can send the encrypted data to Y and the encryption key to Z so that Y and Z can make their own agreements.
What, they broke the encryption and got your data!? Mercy me, how terrible, we sure didn't enable them to do that!
https://homesupport.irobot.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/964/~...
Full disclosure: I am a former iRobot Engineer
"...nothing will be shared without the permission of our customers."
I can absolutely see your point, and would say that they do have actual legal pages on their privacy policy and data security measure, which mentions that they will respond to a legal subpoena, and that you can at any time request that your personal data be deleted, which theu will do.
Again, look you can think I'm full of it amd take this with a huge grain of salt, since I did worm there. All I can tell you is that the people who worked there and started that company are there to make cool robots, not to be personal data brokers or an advertising company, and any conversations we had when I was there were about how we could make things work with other services and do neat smart home stuff, while keeping peoples information safe and privacy intact, not about how we can make money off of peoples data.
(apologies for the typos, small phone screen and fat fingers!)
What are the top 3 ways a business could make money off it?
Do they have a big home? Do they have a small home? I'm sure this is valuable for advertising reasons as well.
How often do they clean their home? If they're cleaning all the time, maybe we should target them with ads for professional cleaners. If they rarely clean their home, there's probably something of value that can be learned from that too.
Its these kinds of things that lead me to sort of trust the CEO here with current products. Even after 2 months the map isn't very accurate and the user can manipulate the data (the map gives no indication between walls, the blockers it comes with, and closed doors).
Probably will keep close attention to see if they ever make any upgrades though.
https://homesupport.irobot.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/964/~...
Therefore the bigger trouble is not in the data that iRobot could have about your cleaning chores or the shape of your house; the real problem would be anybody with enough motivation ringing your door bell with a fake iRobot uniform and the generous offer to replace/upgrade your old roomba with a newer machine for free. Old fashioned social hacking.
but...
If a company offers to come in and vacuum my place for free I'm thinking I should be suspicious (click this box to agree to our terms)...
This is a little novelty device meant for neat freaks and gadgetphiles (no offense intended) who like the idea of a home robot doing a simple chore like keeping a floor clean.
Why would it need any kind of data collection at all, beyond - at most - a minimal set of local (not cloud connected) diagnostics to keep it running? Even that sounds suspect for a self-propelled vacuum cleaner.
In my opinion, which might seem quite opinionated, there are limits to the amount of data that needs to be collected to develop a successful product. Slapping some IoT features on products that don't need to have them just reeks of excessively clever over-engineering, or, possibly, an ulterior motive.