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).
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".
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 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.
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?
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.
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 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?