Hacker News Reader

Comment by ifdefdebug | Hacker News Reader

> The company says the robot completes Laundry Flow and Daily Reset tasks autonomously by default, but uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion.

Does that mean some random human looking at my dirty laundry in the middle of my home, the most intimate place in existence for me? No thank you.

View on HN

Understandable reaction. That being said, thousands of people already pay for the privilege of inviting an actual human into their home every week to clean. For those people, that doesn’t seem likely to be a hurdle.

Personally, I’d probably be willing to stomach a teleoperator but what I would not be comfortable with is the company retaining images, video, and other telemetry from my condo on their servers for who knows how long.

That invited stranger is probably not recording footage that will be stored for all time. There were leaks about how Tesla employees were sharing images/videos of customers.

So much more of it, also strangers come and go, they are there, they knock and shout before entering a room where you might be changing clothes or taking shower. They will not only get leaked and abused internally, it will be also sold. They will also inevitable get hacked (storage or remote access), operators will be maybe even bribed for remote access to certain users, government will subpoena for remote access credentials and videos (assuming they are not going to be given a direct back door (similar to what Google and Meta did in the last). Current landscape user privacy in technology is a fucking mess, unless something technically designed (E2E, no remote access etc) to be private it’ll get abused and will be used against you. As someone who grew up and made a life out of technology I truly hate where we are with it and heavy capitalist and anti-consumer design of almost all new products.

Yea but people invite actual humans into their homes who have names, faces, reputations, relationships, and some degree of social accountability.

If I hire someone to come into my home I can meet them, decide whether I trust them, build familiarity over time, and develop some form of reciprocity. They know whose home they’re entering, and I know who they are.

That feels very different from an anonymous person on the other side of a teleoperated robot... who may be one of many interchangeable operators, switching in and out on some unknown schedule, with no meaningful relationship to me.

Maybe I’m just the wrong audience for this. Because no way am I comfortable with anonymous strangers looking around inside my home.

Yes but I trust the middle aged lady trying to make an honest living than what will likely be an Actually Indian from halfway across the world peeking into my home in a room full of other Indian's gossiping about the customers standards of living. If you don't care that Mr. Joy likes to teleoperate the bot especially while the wife and teenage daughter are active around the house then go for it.

Honestly the Indian worker teleoperating the robot is probably also just a middle aged lady trying to make an honest living.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com