Your Roomba May Be Mapping Your Home, Collecting Data That Could Be Sold
Colin Angle, chief executive of iRobot, told Reuters
that a deal could come in the next two years, though iRobot said in a statement on Tuesday: “We have not formed any plans to sell data.”
In the hands of a company like Amazon, Apple or Google, that data could fuel new “smart” home products.
Your friendly little Roomba could soon become a creepy little spy that sells maps of your house to advertisers: https://t.co/cCTxxnmeqU
“Just remember that the Roomba knows what room your child is in,” Rhett Jones wrote in Gizmodo.
“Your friendly little Roomba could soon become a creepy little spy
that sells maps of your house to advertisers,” tweeted OpenMedia, a Canadian nonprofit.
Jamie Lee Williams, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said information about the size of a home
and the amount of furniture in it could allow advertisers to deduce the owner’s income level.
“When we think about ‘what is supposed to happen’ when I enter a room, everything depends on the room at a
foundational level knowing what is in it,” an iRobot spokesman said in a written response to questions.
What happens if a Roomba user consents to the data collection and later sells his or her home — especially furnished — and now the buyers of the data have a map of a home
that belongs to someone who didn’t consent, Mr. Gidari asked.
