I feel like you are over estimating market demand based on your own preferences. Been there, done that. Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
The market for privacy focused vacuum robots (at a significant premium) is probably not even going to pay for the injection mould tooling
Most techies vastly overestimate how much money most people have available for nice-to-haves like privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird.
Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to think if it is safe to eat.
And then you add the point GP was making, which is that regulation only happens when citizens demand it, and it is politically favorable. The extremely low percentage of the market that demands privacy and security, coupled with everything else, means that these things rarely if ever happen.
But that is orthogonal to the goals of many governments, as I'm sure they have access to most of them either by official or unofficial channels/backdoors.
Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to about my own robot vacuum (which is using Valetudo, so not phoning home to China) just kind of shrugs and says “who cares if audio and video inside my house are being piped to China, I don’t do anything interesting, what use would they have for it?” This also applies to other consumer electronics that do similar things.
They just can’t conceptualize that _in aggregate_ all this mundane information can be wielded by bad actors for their own gains. Which is funny, because they certainly have strong opinions about how Facebook et al are being used to push misinformation.
I don’t know if people would pay 3X for something that actually works in their interest, probably not, but it isn’t as if such a product has been tried in the last ~50 years.
Those wall-to-wall advertising packed smart TVs that cost $350 for a 65" outsell the $1500 65" 10 to 1.
People love low prices. Their concerns about privacy are a distant second or even third (after aesthetics).
It’s weird that you have identified this business opportunity with such confidence, but you are also unwilling to take the money.