Roomba owners, I have some news for you; while they’ve been busy scooping up all the filthy shit on your floor, they’ve also been mapping out your house and storing the data.
That all sounds fairly innocuous, sure, but the company who make your robotic vacuum cleaner, iRobot, is planning on selling that data to other businesses.
The company’s CEO, Colin Angle, says these maps of your home are valuable for the advancement of smart home technology. The spatial data helps Roombas deal with changes to the environment, like, say, moved furniture, but it could also be used by other devices.
“There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” Angle told Reuters.
While he stresses the data won’t be sold without user permission, he also thinks most people will allow it for the increased smart home functionality.
So who will they be selling to? iRobot hopes to strike up a deal with Google, Apple or Amazon within a couple of years, which makes sense given each of these corporations has made a strong play into the smart home space, particularly with home assistants.
Roomba users are able to opt-out of the gadget’s cloud-sharing function with the iRobot Home app, but that still won’t save them from the company’s terms of service and privacy policy. It’s buried fairly deep (typical) inside the documents, but there’s a clause that says iRobot can technically sell your information without consent.
“[We may share your personal information with] other parties in connection with any company transaction, such as a merger, sale of all or a portion of company assets or shares, reorganization, financing, change of control or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company or third party or in the event of bankruptcy or related or similar proceeding.”
Yikes.
At the end of the day, there probably isn’t much else you could do with the data other than help robots learn how to do shit around your house better, but understandably, privacy advocates are pissed off.
As technology requires more and more data to advance, people will need to decide what’s more important – privacy or convenience?
Source: The Verge.
Photo: GoDaddy.
