Amazon's iRobot Deal Is About Roomba Mapping Your Home | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's iRobot Deal Is About Roomba Mapping Your Home

bloomberg.com

11 pointst_a_v_i_s5 comments

> The Bedford, Mass.-based company’s most recent products include a technology it calls Smart Maps ( https://homesupport.irobot.com/s/article/64103 ), though customers can opt out of sharing the data ... Slightly more terrifying, the maps also represent a wealth of data for marketers. The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff.

I'm going to be honest, I don't really buy the surveillance argument. It seems like a noisier, less effective, and convoluted way to gather data that is trivial for Amazon to determine without exfiltrating camera data.

Amazon knows your address, so square footage data is trivially available (along with more precise home values than you can get from square footage alone... A 1,000 sq ft penthouse in Manhattan is going to be way pricier than a 1,000 sq ft trailer in Oklahoma)

If you're someone who is inclined to buy kids stuff or maternity items on Amazon, they probably already know you have kids.

What the article didn’t mention is that it already offers to discover all the Bluetooth (and Wifi) devices in your house w/location, something that might reveal even more details. That said, I immediately assumed they wanted iRobot for the robot expertise.

> "People tend to think of Amazon as an online-seller company, but, really, Amazon is a surveillance company. That is the core of its business model, and that's what drives its monopoly power and profit," Evan Greer, the director of the nonprofit digital-rights-advocacy organization Fight for the Future, told Wired. "Amazon wants to have its hands everywhere, and acquiring a company that's essentially built on mapping the inside of people's homes seems like a natural extension of the surveillance reach that Amazon already has."

> ... "I think this feels really intrusive to people — and it should," Knox told Insider. "Like, when people buy a Roomba, it's because they want clean floors. They don't buy a Roomba to have a little robot inside of your house spying on the layout of your home and whether or not you have a crib in your house or whether or not there are pet toys and a pet bed in a room of your house. So then it can funnel that information to Amazon, and Amazon can push whatever dog-toy ads to you the next time you log on."

> ... "When the company that has its cameras and microphones in your speakers, your doorbell, your security cameras tries to buy the company that knows the shape and contents of your home, it's bad in all the ways," Knox said.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/amazon-bou...

At present, not many vac robots have cameras. Most of them have lidar based mapping. So perhaps knowing about house size is possible, but difficult to gauge if a house has toys.

However, two issues are important here.

1. House sizes are already openly available data, from addresses and satellite data. Heck, even tax filing data, gathered from credit card linked sources is enough to gauge a households income.

2. Future robots may include cameras, for "smart cleaning", but AMZN will definitely keep an inventory of items per household and will sell them stuff. I could imagine AMZN releasing an app to show a product to the vac and the vac will order it for you.

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