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Roomba's Next Big Step Is Selling Maps of Your Home to the Highest Bidder (gizmodo.com)
The maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum, iRobot -- which we have talked about several times in the past -- has found itself embroiled in a privacy row after its chief executive suggested it may begin selling floor plans of customers' homes, derived from the movement data of their autonomous servants. From a report: While it may seem like the information that a Roomba could gather is minimal, there's a lot to be gleaned from the maps it's constantly updating. It knows the floor plan of your home, the basic shape of everything on your floor, what areas require the most maintenance, and how often you require cleaning cycles, along with many other data points. [...] If a company like Amazon, for example, wanted to improve its Echo smart speaker, the Roomba's mapping info could certainly help out. Spatial mapping could improve audio performance by taking advantage of the room's acoustics. Do you have a large room that's practically empty? Targeted furniture ads might be quite effective. The laser and camera sensors would paint a nice portrait for lighting needs that would factor into smart lights that adjust in real time. Smart AC units could better control airflow. And additional sensors added in the future would gather even more data from this live-in double agent.
I hope THEY don't start selling this info....!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
why is this thing connected to the internet in the first place?
Modern mapp mappers use mapps to mapp mapps, or something. Mapps?
To the internet for anything but firmware update?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sadly, it isn't fake.
Sigh.
This is disgusting.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Appliances shouldn't report on their owners.
Having said that, it could be fun having the Roomba send data that indicates:
- Our bathrooms are the size of Airplane hangers
- The master bedroom is actually a dungeon
- Our pets consist of only magical creatures
- My workroom contains nuclear materials
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
And my response to this idea is: Nope.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What data can be gleaned? Casing your house. Doesn't this approach peeping Tom status?
This seems almost as ridiculous as targeting people with dark-colored clothing on hot days to sell more lemonade.
I predict the mindless consumer crowd will be all over this like stink on shit, just like they signed up for data merchants (of YOUR data) like Facebook in droves. Just like they happily install the DeluxeFlashLight932 app that demands permission to scrape your call history and contact list, sending it to who knows where. Just like they'll buy a "Smart TV" with a microphone and connect it to the internet, in the face of warnings from the TV maker not to have "sensitive conversations" in front of the bloody thing. Just like... oh fuck it. We could be here forever.
If there's one lesson to take away from the entire non-techie-driven computing revolution so far, it's that there is nothing they won't consider a bad idea.
Why should I spend money on a Roomba so it can tell me to spend more money?
I'm fully capable of buying furniture on my own, thank you very much.
They mention Amazon as a buyer, but let's get real, spam ads would eventually show up.
Lastly, I'd just disable my Roomba's internet capabilities if I somehow got too lazy to vacuum.
It's all the little bits and pieces that the fit together.
Your floor plan may tell a little about your income, how you live? Do you have a pool table? Is your house over 3,000 square feet?
Do you have bookshelves, are you a reader? Is there a nursery? Kids rooms? A finished basement?
Without spending more than a minute on this, I can already see that they'll learn a lot about you from your vacuum.
Fuck Roomba, and Nest, and my cell phone and ISP. I want a little privacy.
Perhaps now we will finally get some decent FPS maps.
and roomba can be looking at Accessory changers
Yeah, the deal sucks.
*rimshot*
Life is not for the lazy.
Tinfoil hat time turned out to mean "this is really happening and we should not have laughed", or haven't you been paying attention ?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Seriously.... who cares that they know your floor plan? Besides, you listed all these advantages that can help you as a consumer, by
having your other devices know your floor plan!
My only concern is if you bought the device, then the maps should be your property, and you should be free to submit this data to all your smarthome product vendors without adding to the costs of their products.
It seems a bit unfair that you spent $$$ on this robot that collects your data AND the company wants to tax your data instead of allowing you to submit it and do what you will with the data from your bot for free.
Fuck Slashdot for not letting me repeat fuck Roomba
Only APPS can app apps, NOT LUDDITE maps!
Apps!
I would get a roomba, totally would. I have 2 dogs who shed, and I know it would be a big help. However, I have seen one too many of the poop vs roomba pictures, and never want to have to clean that up. One would think there would be some sort of crap detector that could be implemented.
You've been "using and loving" a Roomba for years? May I suggest a Realdoll instead?
#DeleteFacebook
A realdoll with sucktion like a vacuum cleaner and can clean floors? That's called a wife isn't it?
My toilet reports that I like taking huge dumps daily. Send info to company.
Solution. Clean your panic room manually
**Life is too short to be serious**
I have been shopping around for one of these - now it's just not going to happen. Talk about exploiting your customers :-(
"Do you have a large room that's practically empty? Targeted furniture ads might be quite effective."
Yeah, those will be super-effective, because all those people with giant, empty rooms probably aren't aware that a thing called "furniture" exists.
Fuckheads.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Your local county assessor's office already has the floorplan and street view of your house publicly available on the internet for no charge in all likelihood.
Nah, Roombas are cheaper, offer better suction, and make a sexy whirring sound.
Who EVER could have seen this day coming? Before it was on sale? Before it was built?
*sigh*
Some things are such an obvious inevitability it's painful. (Disclaimer - I don't own one)
I’ll never own smart devices
I think we have a deal.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Tinfoil hat time, but the same data could provide the means of a well-crafted home invasion. In the event of a full breach home invasion, one of the advantages that the home owner has is knowing the layout of their home. If those that mean to do harm, have the home layout they can pre-plan out everything in advance.
That's why I rearrange all my rooms daily. Imagine their surprise when they burst into the master bedroom only to find it full of dishes from earlier in the day.
There's no place like
Fuck the roomba, why bother when real estate agents completely photo bomb your rental home, contents and all.
I have said to my SO that privacy is a huge concern that is invaded on a daily basis now without even a whimper.
The idea that a chinsy realestate agents office packed full of photos, keys, addresses and a shitty office alarm system any competent career criminal could bypass is just mind boggling.
I dubbed it a criminals wet dream crime spree.
The potential for someone to gain access to all of this data (all digital on an office server (If you're lucky! maybe just Windows workstations running home): photos of entire house internals including occupants items, addresses, photos of keys and alarm codes) and to enter it all into a crime database categorising special homes of interest is very real and extremely valuable to the criminal burglar.
Just because my Roomba has the capability to connect to WiFi doesn't mean I've enabled it to do so, and since there aren't any unsecured WiFi hotspots close to my home I don't have to worry about it back-channeling data to the mothership. It's not like they are going to crawl through my neighborhood with an unsecured hotspot van to get the data off of my Roomba. Google Earth already learned the hard way not to try stunts like that.
It would be expensive to collect, digitise, maintain, host, and update information in that sort of detail, so it seems unlikely. The assessors office will be interested in value for taxation purposes, and plans for remodels where some sort of permission was required and new builds might be available, but a unique plan of every house of every age? I doubt it.
If those that mean to do harm, have the home layout they can pre-plan out everything in advance.
I'm not sure who is doing you harm, but it sounds like they are a well connected intelligence agency. You're likely screwed either way.
Can't we go one fucking product without someone trying to sell our private info?
policy which basically said: Yeah, if you want to keep your data private, just don't activate any of the cool features that we use to sell this device. You can't use any advanced feature or connect it to the internet.
Not quite to the scumbag-ness as Microsoft, but pretty fucking scummy.
No floor plan for our assessments and street view doesn't cover where the houses are a mile apart... try again.
Depends on where you live -- in the few cities around where I live, you can most definitely look up the floorplans as well as other info on the assessor website -- both new properties (my own house, from 2006) as well as old ones (my in-laws, 1950)