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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes.

I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.

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Also, didn't Roomba already leak non-consensual bathroom videos?

> interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing.

That is pretty far down the list. For the most part, they just want to see what products you have so they can sell you more.

It is absolutely a PR problem. Privacy is a real concern, but it's the PR that companies are scared of. As, say, Flock have been starting to find out lately. Public backlash matters.

And PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too. For instance, people started avoiding Ring cameras once it got out that they're a privacy nightmare -- that's PR. Sure, the people that avoid them care about privacy -- that's why they're listening -- but PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to. Likewise, PR is how people get creeped out by robots scanning their homes. They already never wanted that, of course, but they weren't creeped out until they learned about it. That's PR. Now people are wary to let any new devices into their homes, especially robots, because of historical PR like this. And so now it is a PR problem to get people to give you a chance in the first place.

Edit: I want to be explicit here that I'm saying you avoid bad PR by not only being good but having people discover the good. And waiting for people to sufficiently discover it can be a struggle. It doesn't matter how good you are if people don't know. That's what I mean by it being a PR problem -- PR is how people know.

I find your comment bewildering. It seems so focused on the perceived effect of an issue that it leaves no room for the actual material effect of the issue.

Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.

The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.

> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.

Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.

> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.

This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.

> Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.

What I'm saying is that PR influences how the masses perceive your product and therefore whether it gets mass adoption or mass avoidance. Yes, the so-called "material effect" (whether privacy is actually undermined by the product) results in PR one way or the other, but most people don't do the digging to figure out exactly what the material is, they rely on what has reached the public eye.

> Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.

You overcome it by being able to prove you don't invade privacy. That's overcoming the preconceived notion that products in your category are not to be trusted in general.

I never, ever said or meant that the goal is to still undermine privacy but just not have people find out or have a problem with it. (Even though most companies in practice have this goal)

Zero VC funded companies in this space will not eventually invade privacy if they're able to. The only way to avoid that is open source and self-hosted - actually owning the equipment AND fully controlling the open software stack. Anything else will eventually be exploited for spying by a VC funded company. Rug pulls always happen - "Don't be evil" always turns into "Be nearly maximally evil" for financial reasons in corporations configured to be exploitable in this way by their shareholders...

Just about sums up the attitude.

It’s not that the robots are surveilling and that would be morally wrong… it’s that people are upset by it and that impacts the bottom line.

“I’m sorry that you chose to feel that way”

Nowhere did I ever say anything is not a real issue or that people don't have reasons to be upset or any of the things you people seem to be putting in my mouth. By PR problem I literally mean that people have to discover and spread that your product is genuinely not a violation of privacy, which of course requires that your product genuinely not be a violation of privacy. Nowhere did I ever say that the problem is that people have a problem with it. The problem is that people don't know you don't do it until they know. For business that is a struggle because you can't necessarily control what people know like that. All you can do is make the same claims everybody else makes and hope that someone will independently investigate and discover that yours are claims that actually hold up.

That's like saying a law and order problem is a PR problem because word got out that crime is spiking.

The PR problem is downstream consequence of what can be measured, but the root cause is upstream. Focusing directly on solving the downstream problem is basically Goodharting the metric -- thereby ensuring the upstream problem never really gets solved, and the downstream metric becomes fake and decoupled from the true situation.

Once you "solve the PR problem" what is the incentive to ensure that the root problem is actually solved now that you have successfully blinded yourself (society) from measuring the true problem?

Well, it is a PR problem. It's bad for business to cause a crime spike... that's my point.

I never said focus directly on downstream. I thought it would be obvious that I'm talking about why you bother with upstream, because the downstream effects are important.

It seems I phrased something very wrong because it looks like everybody is assuming I'm saying that you should do as much bad as you can possibly prevent people from noticing.

It's one of several downstream problems, including poorer quality of life by various metrics. By emphasizing a PR problem for businesses more than other human problems downstream or the root problem, you are demonstrating priorities that prosocial humans viscerally disagree with.

I've been thinking a lot about what it would look like to support verifiable/auditable guarantees around data exfil/capture for this class of use.

I don't think it's enough to pinky-promise that you aren't sending a dragnet of video with facial capture etc back to the mothership, I think you really end up wanting auditable proof that nothing sensitive can leave the robot or at the very least a no-logging hot-path inference loop (e.g. apple's confidential compute).

I think internet people care about some theoretical surveillance angle more then anyone else actually does. People hire cleaners and tradespeople into their homes all the time.

The practical problems with robots are effectiveness, cost and safety in roughly equal parts.

> People hire cleaners and tradespeople into their homes all the time.

It's very obvious that there is a difference between a single person that you can personally vet, and something that records videos that can be shared anywhere.

> I think internet people care about some theoretical surveillance angle more then anyone else actually does.

Yes, that's usually the case. However in the very current time of surveillance resistance with the de-Flock movement, I think there is increased mainstream awareness of the issue.

I think you’re partly right: normal ‘non-internet’ folk care less about such things… until a reason to care is demonstrated.

Take the recent anti-Flock actions - it’s probably mostly not ‘internet people’ going for evening walks with their angle grinders. Everyone starts to care about privacy when it really becomes invasive.

Likewise, people might be fine getting their elderly parents a robot to help out with household tasks, until intimate stolen videos start appearing on realgrannies.com or similar.

Sadly we're all internet people, and have been for about 15 years. If you mean people on Hacker News... Then yes, obviously they're by and large better informed about the reality of surveillance, government and corporate, than most. Nothing theoretical about any of it. Unless we fail to remember the content of Snowdon's leaks.

Why don't they just turn on our phones cameras all day long

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