Sounds great, but unless they offer a model with no internet connectivity it'll be a no from me. I've got an older Roomba that only has 802.15.4 and IR connectivity, with no cameras. That feels a lot safer.
I'd rather not have a 3rd party have floor-plans of my house and continuously images of every inch of my home. I'd rather all of that data stay local to a device that I own and control.
It does sound like a lot of trouble for a vacuum cleaner, though.
I mean, how clean do people need their floors to be? I vacuum like once every couple weeks and it’s not like I’m getting sick or my floors look gross.
Carpets I've had could go months without noticing anything, but the amount of dust bunnies and random crap of unknown origin that got stuck to my feet shocked me the first place I got with a hardwood floor.
I'm with you though. No way would I EVER get anything like that that connected to the internet. I can't think of any benefits that would remotely come close to justifying that behavior.
Even if it meant insurance would drop to $0, one "leak" and anyone with a bit of resources can get a nice up to date map of your house, when you're around, what lights are on, when their on, etc. It would be much worse than that site that scarfed social media and documented when people were on vacation, left the house or whatever.
Next up: it'll just connect to 4G. I hope that doesn't happen, but it just seems all too likely.
Interesting! The camera functionality still works without an internet connection? I'd always assumed that some of the processing was getting offloaded to the "cloud," since I couldn't see another reasonable need for the wifi connection.
In what way?
(1) has internet connectivity,
(2) has poor security (due to bad design/implementation and/or lack of updates), and
(3) is on your internal network.
It may not be a valuable target itself, but it can serve as a beachhead to launch further attacks on other devices on the same network. Assuming you rely on some firewall-style network security (a notion of inside and outside), which most people do.
Laptops run operating systems written by and supported by software companies. Because software is one of their core competencies, they are more likely to understand vulnerabilities and release updates to patch them in a timely manner. And they are more likely to continue releasing updates for years.
IoT devices (security cameras, etc.) are usually made by companies whose core competency is hardware. They tend to think in terms of making money by selling hardware, and the software may be viewed as overhead and of secondary importance. You are lucky to get any updates at all, and updates tend to cease long before the hardware stops working.