Hacker News Reader

Comment by agilob | Hacker News Reader

Schema of your property, number of people living there and times where no one is at home is definitely useful for amazon.

View on HN

The schema of your property is already publicly available in home schematics records, and they already have your address to look up.

I think Occam's Razor applies here. iRobot is a profitable smart home product maker, their revenue/profit has continuously grown, and their IP + talent will allow Amazon to expand into other smart home verticals.

Yes it's possible to lookup the schematics but completely impractical at Amazon's scale.

If home schematics were actually a thing they cared about (and I'm skeptical of even that premise), then at Amazon's scale, they could make it easy to achieve at their scale.

It is a totally different proposition to go and often manually lookup and harvest building floorplan data from town/city archives than to passively collect the same data floorplan data generated by devices in their ordinary operation.

The former is not scaleable in any reasonable way and every operation is an ADDITIONAL cost, whereas the latter is generated for the products' main purpose and you merely add some storage for the harvested data. Moreover, the generated data will be much more up-to-date (plenty of renovations or updates happen without building permits, legally or not).

I think experience has shown us time and time again that the following forms are misapplications of Occam's Razor:

- business decision X isn't (in part) motivated by the intention to exploit the incidental access to data a product class brings

- data class Y seems worthless/redundant, they wouldn't make a business out of it

Scans of people's home layout definitely wouldn't be worthless, I just don't think that's the main motivator of the acquisition.

It’s not the home layout so much as the habits that data uncovers. Access to peoples homes is the holy grail and especially so in amazons case. Whereas the Alexa gives Amazon audio from inside, and ring gives them video and audio from outside, this would take things a step further. You have the obvious data like in and outs, bedtimes, house schedules (kitchen to living room, living room to bedroom, bedroom to bathroom trips) but it can also get more granular and even more so with LiDAR and image recognition. Imagine a vacuum that knows which brand of shoe you wear and size of feet you are, which can then identify if a new pair shoes up on its next scan (same size? Oh this person bought a new pair of shoes. Different size? Oh this person is potentially in a relationship now.)

These are all key data points which Amazon drools over.

The locations of walls and doors, yes. Your furniture and other stuff, no. Having a "man on the inside" able to tell whether that third bedroom is being used as an office or a nursery could be of value to a company deciding whether to advertise child care products or office supplies. Hell just giving a heads up that a household is in the market for a big ticket item like a couch could be quite valuable.

And now realize Chinese brands of cleaning robots have build in full detailed mapping (lidar/camera/ai), and do call home.

My robot vacuum sits docked away from me, on a separate floor, during the day. It runs at night time and I never see it. It's connected to its own IOT network. How would it know how many people live in my home and when I'm not there?

Roomba uses cameras which don’t work at night. If you run it in the dark it gets stuck. At least the 960.

Shoes/slippers, number of toothbrushes, coats/jackets, beds. Yes, they do have cameras and call home. Opsec is hard.

And for burglars.

I assume you're talking about the kind with a badge. Normal criminals don't get access to Amazon's info before entering a house.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it's only a matter of time until Amazon's data is leaked and sold on the black market. Correlate house layout, number of residents and their schedules, plus income bracket (from another source, possibly also from Amazon), and it's a blueprint for burglars looking for an easy score in an upper-middle class neighborhood.

Your take reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/

Don't forget to filter out homes that didn't buy an alarm system off Amazon

You don't need to go to the black market. You can look up the property at the county (or whatever) clerk's office or look at satellite imagery and get a pretty good approximation.

A ton of things are public information to a greater or lesser degree whether you like it or not.

People who rob upper-middle class homes are not going to do so because they have a house layout in advance. They're just going to rob the house. And anybody who goes to the lengths of buying Amazon data on the black market is not going to be interested in stealing people's laptops and jewelry.

I think that's a bit naïve, considering how common it is to see modern tech and basic/traditional crimes intersect - from ATM card cloning, to using Tor+cryptocurrencies for buying drugs, car key fob hacking, etc.

Sure the people who currently buy data on the black market won't all start robbing houses, and the people currently robbing houses won't all start buying illegal data to help their burgling.

But as long as the economics make sense (and it likely would - once someone has a bunch of useful data that they want to sell illegally, they'll lower the price until it is worth being bought by people), some burglars definitely will start adding more intelligence to their planning including using black market data leaks for picking houses to target and for how/when to rob them, what items to look for, etc.

And potentially you also get other people for whom burglary wasn't a feasible option before, but combined with this new tool might be. Personally I'm not going to become a burglar for ethical reasons, but for the sake of a hypothetical let's pretend that I have no ethics whatsoever and think that stealing is a fantastic idea as long as I can avoid getting caught. I still wouldn't rob houses, because it would seem like quite a risky way of making money, and with each big risk taken there's a fair chance of not even finding anything particularly valuable once you've broken into a house.

But if I could buy data leaks that I trusted which told me which houses to rob to find the best ROI items (high value, easy to carry, and maybe even located thanks to the camera of a robot vacuum), and also told me when people would be home and would be asleep.... well maybe my hypothetical no-ethics self would still find a better crime to commit, but it'd be a hell of a lot more tempting to become a burglar than without all that data!

Do you really think there haven't already been crimes committed that involves basic dumb theft but where the targets were chosen based off a leaked list of car purchases, or jewellery shop customers, or...? And not just in the era of digital data theft, go back a thousand years and I'd assume there were some "crimes of opportunity" committed not on a whim but thanks to planning enabled only by the studying of information they shouldn't have been in possession of.

Not to mention the location of valuables, security cameras (other than Ring, as they can just turn those off), any security dogs or cats. How do you think Jeffrey Beesoz got so rich?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com