Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>it seemed that Chinese robot vacuums were light years ahead.

They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money.

Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics.

At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.

View on HN

Do we think an amazon owned iRobot wasn't going to use the computer vision to catalogue all the shit I owned in my house and suggest things I am missing lol...

> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked,

The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.

Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary.

You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.

> Privacy is not a cameras or no-cameras dependent binary.

If it has no camera and no microphone, the worst case leak is way better than what iRobot has already been caught doing:

(The toilette videos) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...

Sure, but that's like saying being punched in the face is better than being punched in the nuts.

You have yet to say why. Making random hyperboles and sounding angry isn't an argument, it's a tantrum.

Just saying one is way worse than the other, even though they're both still bad, what more do you want? It's obvious to everyone.

> You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.

Given that I use roughly the same number of cloud and government services as other people, and live in a city, to me this is privacy. Without cameras or microphones it falls within my tolerance for information that third parties know about me given the risk of those third parties abusing that data (either directly or via hackers).

Sorry to break the bad news to you but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.

>but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.

I'm not living in anger, I'm just not comfy sharing my data with Chinese companies and their random cloud services. I think that applies to most people actually.

Yes the ship has long sailed on the online privacy of the Average Joe who's already knees deep in Google, Meta, Tinder, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, but that doesn't mean I should just bend over to more of those from China as well.

Privacy is not binary, as in you either have it or you don't, but you can actively control and limit how much you give away once you're educated on the subject and willing to invest a few clicks through cookie banners, ad blockers, etc.

Unless China can use it's data on me to perform blackmail directly I could care less. Now the US government or US companies are a different story. They can correlate tons of data, impact life decisions (credit scores, medical coverage, insurance rates, etc.), cause significant impact (suspect in police investigations, tax audits, etc.), go after me for perceived damages (in court or less legally like those ebay executives, etc.), etc. The police of any country put innocent people into jail every single day. Them I'm worried about not some nebulous threat from China.

>Unless China can use it's data on me to perform blackmail directly I could care less.

You're probably not an Uighur.

No, they have they are just "IR" cameras and they avoid using word "camera", but they are still pretty much the same cameras.

iRobot is catching up to their Chinese competitors in many ways, including privacy concerns. Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom. In iRobot's (IMO weak) defense, the woman or someone in her household had opted into third party data sharing

In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions

I had Roborock with a camera and it had more privacy protections that I've seen in Roomba - the camera remote access was locked out, when cameras was on it had a loud "recording" warning, the API worked locally from app to the vac (which is not the case for iRobot), the map was stored on the robot itself, etc.

Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.

I have two (vacuum and mop) and I’m happy with them. Slow ? Yes. Who cares it gets done in the day while I work ! Effective: yes.

> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked

Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"

> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked,

One of the reason I never connected my Neato is that I had no interest in having a map of my flat uploaded to the company's servers.

What is the threat from someone having an approximate floor plan of where you live?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i...

> Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook [...] Robot would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. [...] These workers then shared at least 15 images—including shots of a minor and of a woman sitting on the toilet—to social media groups where they gathered to talk shop.

To be fair, when the photo of a woman taking a shit was shared on facebook, her face was blurred.

Once something is online there's also the (less important but perhaps more likely) risk they'll send software updates that remove features, add adverts, force you to set up an account, and other nonsense like that.

See comment above:

> Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom.

It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space.

>It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space.

Most robo-vacs don't have cameras, but lidar/IR sensors so all they get is a 2D map of your floorplan, not video footage.

Yea mine is just LIDAR. What feature would it need video for?

Some fancier models use cameras for obstacle detection and avoidance. They try to identify stuff than chokes and clogs the robovacs so they can avoid them, like socks, USB cables or Lego on the floor, or my personal favorite, pet poop.

There was a funny video on social media, of a home surveillance camera capturing the pet taking a dump in the middle of the living room, and then the Roomba smearing it everywhere as it did its rounds. If you're a pet owner who's companion can do their business in your house, having the robovac smear it everywhere is a nightmare you'd want to avoid at all cost, and that can only be solved using cameras.

IR sensors are just cameras, also IR can look through some clothes

No, mate you're wrong. IR sensors are just an IR LED and a diode, not cameras.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com