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Roomba Is No Spy: CEO Says iRobot Will Never Sell Your Data (zdnet.com)
It's been a challenging week for iRobot, the company behind the popular Roomba robotic vacuums. From a report: It started with an interview in Reuters, in which the company's chief executive Colin Angle gave the clear impression that iRobot was selling consumers' home mapping data (Editor's note: the chief executive said the company intended to explore the opportunity). Last night, Angle and iRobot got back to me on this issue. They provided the following response to the concerns I and others shared. "First things first, iRobot will never sell your data. Our mission is to help you keep a cleaner home and, in time, to help the smart home and the devices in it work better. There's no doubt that a robot can help your home be smarter. It's the data it collects to do its job, and the trusted relationship between you, your robot and iRobot, that is critical for that to happen. Information that is shared needs to be controlled by the customer and not as a data asset of a corporation to exploit. That is how data is handled by iRobot today. Customers have control over sharing it. I want to make very clear that this is how data will be handled in the future."
Keeping it local is all that's needed for effective room vacuuming.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Oh wait, you won't do that, will you?
I considered getting a Roomba recently. Not anymore.
Do you believe the written contract or an off the cuff remark by their CEO?
This guy sounds like the Ford CEO saying that they know whenever someone runs a red light.
He outed himself, and the company doesn't deserve a dime.
I sincerely hope they go out of business.
Imagine their mentality in a company who sells a sexbot...
I saw the kind of data those fancy vacuum cleaners are collecting. No Thanks. Meth heads drawing on the walls, leaving cigarettes all over the place, broken beer bottles.... ok. Robots roaming around pretending to clean the place while sending SIGINT to the 0.01%'rs. No Thanks.
Even if he is sincere, which is certainly possible and even likely, the data collected will potentially be out there forever. It means not only are you trusting this CEO, you are trusting every possible future CEO and every company that may one day buy iRobot and every situation that may develop when the company is someday having financial stress and so on. Furthermore you are trusting that no hacker ever penetrates the systems holding the aggregated data.
This is the same problem with every IOT device. Deciding that you trust the current data collector is only a small piece of the large situation.
So who's he been giving it freely away to in exchange for financial compensation in some fashion, then?
As we've seen before, all it takes is to have a merger or a sale. And then the new owners will milk it like the golden cow. We've seen that over, and over, and over again. That's what half the buy-outs do, they're just a clearing house, to carve up the company assets and sell them piecemeal for more than they paid for the lot. That's why we see so many companies get sold twice in rapid succession - they get bought out, the valuable IP etc they have gets distributed around, and the husk of the company gets resold.
So when they say "We PROMISE!", I say it doesn't matter if you keep your word or not, it's not going to be UP to you when it matters.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They transmit information back to systems, and pick up on abuse so the abusers are punished.
Seriously it's a vacuum cleaner. The anonymised data about how and when it cleans your floors isn't exactly sensitive.
The horse has already bolted long ago on your personal information. Accept it and move on, you're just a node in a giant dataset and nothing bad has really come of it.
Our Roomba 860 is defeated on a nightly basis by my 2 year old daughter's 3 sets of wired headphones and appropriately sized oven mitts from her play kitchen. Collect all the data you like....
.. no CEO ever.
I own 2 Roomba 980's and I was very disappointed by this debacle. If their intent is truly to help their customers and not gather data to sell at a later date, then they could start by not artificially blocking VPN in their mobile application. The mobile app is able to function over directly over local WiFi without internet access, but if you're remote, it checks if the device is connected to WiFi and matches on the SSID associated with the Roomba. If they don't match, it refuses to operate without going through the cloud even if you can successfully connect to the Roomba by IP over VPN (and call the APIs manually). It doesn't even try to connect by IP. This tells me that they're really more interested in trying to ensure you use the Cloud, and thus they get all the data.
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Of course not. Unless you get an email saying that the ToS has changed. Then, well, maybe, your private data may be sold as part of the bounty that the company purchasing Roomba gets to acquire. How many people have gotten The Email that states "we've been bought. Your data no longer belongs to you."?
Is the acquiring company buying Roomba because of the thing that maps out your house, or is the company buying Roomba because of the database of house layouts?
It's not like all those devices actually need internet connections. They are simply data gathering devices that send all that data home to their true masters who will collect, analyze and sell all that data to the highest bidder. THAT is the business model. Any talk of "giving users better control" is just talk.
There's an opportunity for the company, iRobot, to do something about this?
Put a plan to secure the data technically and legally, get in touch with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, get the issue written about in the company's statutes so that a rogue CEO or director etc. can't overturn the decision and sell data on a whim next Tuesday, give control to the customers for turning off the data collection or the entire feature. (perhaps allow to keep the data on the LAN, though that's more complex and for a smaller portion of the user base. So a binding data protection policy plus an on/off switch would be better than nothing already)
Much was probably done by the company's lawyers, devs, engineers, business people. And I'm an "armchair general" writing this.
But if you can benefit by emphasizing you're a company that makes vacuums and you're not a google/amazon etc., then it would be nice to have some set of procedures, certification, statute (I'm not sure how to word this), something that e.g. companies that make "paramedical" devices like glucose monitors, or security companies or others could follow as well.
Its a vaccum cleaner. Can it be denied internet access and still function?
There is a simple and effective way iRobot can ensure that all your data is completely safe from all the future what-if scenarios:
Don't upload the data to iRobot. Make the robots keep all the data locally, and never send it over the Internet at all.
Okay, if you are collecting data, you are collecting for only one reason: To profit from it. I've yet to see an exception of when a company collects data, it eventually sells it in part or has a whole for maximum profit. I think at this point people have finally begun to realize that if someone in tech can be abused it will, and with vigor. Everyone who said "we won't sell your data" has been caught collecting data and selling it in one form or another. Microsoft, they collection so much from Windows 10, and cars with Skype installed (?!?), tablets and so on. Using it to pump ads at people through Windows 10/Skype/Office 365. At&T, Google included (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-newman/why-googles-spying-on-use_b_3530296.html). Basically, it can be sold it will. So the folks at Roomba could at least stop trying to insult our intelligence. The who purpose of the data collection is to monetize it. That boils down to selling it, one way or another.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
They will simply give it to their 'partners'. A round about method of selling it.
Does the unit work if its connection to the internet is blocked ? If so, simple fix at the router makes this whole thing moot.
Why does a vaccuum cleaner need an internet connection ?
So if you upgrade to a newer Roomba or have to swap it out under warranty, the replacement doesn't have to learn the floor layout from scratch. I'm not saying it's vital, but it does serve a useful function. The technically competent among us would probably rather have it upload the layout to our NAS. But for the 95% who are technically illiterate, the "it just works" appeal of cloud storage probably is much more attractive.
Then the buyers will sell your info
I heard about the Rumba mapping out the house. I heard the data was to be sold to deep data. What I don't understand is how anyone could think this could be monitized. Other than thiefs with way too much money to spend, anyway, and even there, it's not clear how that would be useful to them.
In any case, I was just wondering.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Shared means I should have access to my data too. Taken means I don't have access to my data.
The US and many other countries employ spies all the time, but never sell the data. Selling it makes you an information broker, merely getting it makes you a spy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Even if it can't, there are workarounds. I seen several examples of pirated Adobe Creative Cloud suites with blockers to trick CC into thinking it phoned home. I doubt a Roomba would require more effort.
In USA, E V E R Y T H I N G is for sale. From left right top or bottom direction, there is always some way to monetise any sort of gathered information.
They want to sell their stuff and will say whatever it takes to do so. Of course they will not sell your data, until they change their mind because of their shareholders / losses / possibility to make more money / change in CEO / ....
And you can trust him, because no CEO has ever told a lie.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
sell the data. Words from a CEO are meaningless without legal backing and protections.
Me roomba spy on humans collect data send to cloud hehe.
Unless it's part of the sales agreement that they won't ever sell your data, this doesn't mean shit. Even so, if the sales agreement isn't a signed contract, it might get broken. Company get sold to somebody who wants to recoup the acquisition price with that sweet, sweet data. Ooops, sorry.
Of course they won't sell my data, I won't buy a Roomba.
...until this blows over in the media and until iRobot has a chance to update their terms of service "agreement." :(
"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like." -- Edward, First Baron Thurlow.
We'll just give your data away for free when someone buys our special paper clip for the low, low price of a million dollars!
Roomba has a partnership "Roomba Data Services LLC", rents the data to them, and they will sell the data.
If my aunt had a dick, she'd me my uncle.