If we are permitted baseless speculation: NO, almost certainly not.
Reason #1: Amazon needs robotics people badly. Roomba has a lot of robotics people and expertise. It's a natural fit, and an easy way to acquire a bunch of fully functional robotics teams.
Reason #2: Vacuum robots are useful things, especially for people with pets, which is probably most Amazon customers. Chinese companies are eating Roomba's lunch when it comes to cleaning robots (and Amazon knows it!), so Amazon probably thinks they can compete, win, and yield profit on this investment. They'll do it by leveraging their existing warehouse expertise to help the robot clean your house better.
Non-Reason #1: They want to sell your home information to the police state. Come on people, your local government already knows the layout of your home, you have to tell them that when you build it!
Non-Reason #2: They want to look at products in your home to sell you stuff. Sorry, the embedded systems that are going to be on these things are going to be able to recognize "fridge," "bed," "power strip." Not "Miele SKU #7560, Brand New Condition" or "IKEA Krugsforst Chair, Tattered Underfabric". They are running mobilenet on 512x512 thumbnails, not efficientdet-v7 on 12 megapixel raw input. There is no GTX3080 on board this thing, and they're not gonna stream a high resolution video to AWS. And Lidar cannot tell what color your shoes are, or even that the point cloud is a pair of shoes.
Non-Reason #3: They want to know what you own so that they can determine some other information about you. Uh, this thing is going to connect to your router, see a MacBook Pro, and a Sonos speaker connected, and subsequently know your monthly disposable income to the $10's. They already know this information -- they don't to do a bunch of extremely difficult statistics on the huge amount of data this thing could generate to figure these things out.
Reason #0: Amazon sells things. This is a thing they can sell. You'll probably buy this thing after they acquire it, make it better, and market it to you.
Just to elaborate a bit because this is a pet-peeve.
What's going on here is that people are misdirected. They've seen a bunch of sci-fi where physical robots moving through space can sense the world around them and use the information they gather to make the world legible to them. The assumption (fair, because moving robots look like us!) is that that is the easiest way to gather information is to physically See, Touch, and Hear it. Sophisticated robot system that looks scifi -> this must be the leading edge of the cyberpunk dystopia.
The reality is completely different. Your life is already legible to the computer. For the purposes of whatever cyberpunk dystopia you imagine we are in, your 1kb credit card statement is like an 8K Imax camera to the Ministry for Coercion.
The leading edge of the cyberpunk dystopia is the apparatus that tries to get you to be more online. Write more posts and emails, sign up for smart banking, use an internet system to keep track of your employees, digitize paper files and make them legible.
Why would any intelligent malignant thing use the extremely power hungry and inefficient raw input from a physical robot for its purposes when it could use the extraordinarily efficient raw text format of bank statements, insurance claims, credit reports, browser history...
Every piece of information that you imagine could be used against you in the hypothetical dystopia hinted at in this piece would fit inside of 100 megabytes of plain text. Plain text that you, or an entity working for your insurance company, typed into a computer. They already have it.
These things -- scifi-looking robots -- really are just trying to clean your house better and sell you products more cheaply.
I kinda agree with you, but also not. I think a lot of people here are over assuming what the robots can sense and yes, this is that Sci-Fi like reality. But this doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. Anyone that has seriously worked with data will tell you how subtle things can reveal a lot of information. Let's look at these robots. Knowing that there are pets and/or children in a house is useful data to sell kids/pet toys and other items. You might think "Amazon already has that info from purchasing history" but a second source builds higher confidence and can differentiate if something was bought for yourself or for a friend. There's also information like how much the roomba fills up. Are you a messy person or very organized? Do you take off your shoes at the door? When you sit down at the couch? At all? Do you make frequent spills or messes in certain rooms? This obviously has selling potential.
You don't need microphones or super sensors. Basic information can do a lot. There's also a lot to be said about redundancy and verification. I think you're over-correcting in your rebuttal. This is the reason data is scary, because it is simple and things you wouldn't think are useful. But they are useful when you have thousands or millions of data points.
This is a great point, and you are absolutely correct about extracting signal from noise.
But not this kind of data!
There might be some useful signal in the points you describe. But it will be extremely difficult to extract, because first you have to sense it ($$$$ -- what is a pet hair to a robot?), then you have to turn the sensor data into something parsable ($$$$ -- how do you determine if this thing the vacuum picked up is a pet hair?), then you have to do the hard data work to make a link between these physical world things and a signal Amazon actually cares about ($$$$ -- OK, they have a Shih Tzu. How can we improve product recommendations with that?).
The time of a sensor fusion/robotics person/statistics person at Amazon will not be spent on any of this, not for many years. The data that Amazon does not need these robots to collect, such as zip code, other devices on the LAN, purchase history and login time, and so on -- there is enough low-hanging fruit there to occupy every newly minted PhD for years. The opportunity cost of a statistician working on this robot stuff for an hour outweighs the benefit by an order of magnitude or more. The opportunity cost of a robotics expert, this is even more true. Robots run into stuff and break in the warehouse every single day; for a company like Amazon, that is millions of dollars.
I do concede: they will definitely collect and store it. But it will be a very long time before any of this data is used in the name of evil. On the other hand, if they make the robot good at cleaning your house, they might sell a $400 robot to a hundred million people.
I totally agree with your point, though, and will offer an Amazon-flavored extension of it:
Look at how Amazon gets YOU to freely give them data to digitize your life. They want you to sign up for digital statements on the ChaseBank Silver Plus Amazon Card. Why? They lobby against data-protection legislation. Why? The ebook app wants location data from your phone. Why? They want you to purchase PS4 games on Amazon, instead of on the publisher's website. Why?
The robots thing is easy to understand for us because we are morphologically similar to Amazon robots. The rest of this stuff, though, is the real low hanging fruit. And there is enough of it to occupy every single $200,000/yr data science PhD being graduated -- for now, and for a long time coming.
> But it will be a very long time before any of this data is used in the name of evil.
I'm surprised that people here are honestly giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt when it comes to data collection. Or asking "what could Amazon do with the data?", "must be benign". "Very long time" is very relative. One year? Three years? Even under the relatively naive assumption that Amazon doesn't already have any plan to monetize all that collected data or use it any other way, what happens when they eventually do? At that point even discounting all the collected data as "expired", Amazon will have an army of these in the wild and realistically people won't throw them out, they'll just internalize the escalation of data collection and keep going.
This is a Trojan horse, if they came equipped with cameras, LIDAR, and microphones. Nothing wrong with that as long as you don't start from the wrong idea and assumption. This will be used to collect as much data as it can and you'll have close to no control over that. If you're fine with it or think you can benefit too, all good.
I think it is because people are really bad at logic. Seriously. Most of the arguments on here are coming from a very bad set of assumptions. The major assumption here is, like the OP said, some Sci-Fi sensor data. Even as I tried to explain this people are still thinking way too exact data ("Shih Tzu" vs "small dog"). People are correct to counter these claims, but when they do, they usually go overboard. They say the data is useless or "they already have it, so it is effectively useless." Verification is a powerful tool.
But I think a large amount really comes down to the fact that people don't think from the statistics or mathematical viewpoint (despite claims). I've read probably more on stats and prob than the vast majority of people here yet I would never remotely claim I'm good at stats. It is fucking hard, yet so many think it is so easy (be wary of anyone that suggests it is easy). So here's some things I notice:
- People think we need crazy specific details to find trends, but you can extract signal from noise with a lot of data (especially diversified data) and very careful insights. The counter to this isn't to just dismiss but to ask if simpler data can be useful[0]. We feel the need to take a drastically opposing argument rather than a nuanced argument.
- Thinking that there are singular causal factors (see the arguments "it is about robots, not data" when it is clearly both). We talk about PCA all the time but a lot of our arguments create frameworks where we're only discussing what is the dominant factor and pretending that others don't matter[1].
- Being nowhere near familiar with emergence and how it plays a role in data and our lives (I suspect lack of emergence knowledge is why so many believe in "deep state" or conspiracies).
- Not framing things from a probabilistic viewpoint. I see this in security arguments (usually among non-experts but tech literate: see the Signal community forums or here). Most security is probabilistic in nature and about putting bounds, not guarantees. The classic example is remotely wiping a phone. If you wipe, there's a probability that an adversary hasn't gotten the data first. If it isn't wiped, said adversary has all the time in the world. Everything, and I mean literally everything, is a probability. What we call truth just has tight bounds.
- Zero sum fallacy. Many people think the vast majority of games are zero sum, when very few really are. We see this a lot in economics (value can in fact be added to the system. It is only zero sum in a infinitesimal point in time). A tide raises or sinks ships equally, it does not raise some and sink others to the point where we have a balanced system.
- Over simplification and thinking higher order approximations aren't necessary for "good enough."[1] People think that most probability distributions in the wild are Normal(ish) when they aren't (most have heavy tails). This is all caused by creating a "spherical cow in a vacuum" framework. An oversimplification of a problem isn't necessarily a good approximation and can often lead you in the wrong direction! Specifically the major challenges we face today, we need higher order terms to even get a reasonable approximation. For those math inclined, think of the Taylor series approximation of e^x (1 + x + x^2/2! +...+ x^n/n!). y = 1 isn't a good approximation except in a very narrow region (around x=0). y = x + 1 is even a worse approximation (depending on your region of interest)! Even a 4th order approximation is only useful on the bounds [-1, 1] (8th order will get us to [-2,2], maybe [-3,3]), but diverges quickly beyond that. If we're concerned about x<0 then the first order approximation is better than the first 5 (y=1 is closer to e^-100 than the 5th order x=-100). But if we're concerned with x>0 then the higher orders are even better.
The real Trojan horse is how we've structured a belief that these things don't matter. That we think simple answers are good ("you don't know something unless you can explain it to a child" is bullshit). I suspect that this is evolutionary as this framework has allowed us to solve most of the issues related to survival. The problem is that our modern society is much more complicated than that and we have effectively solved these survival hardships. The problems we face are now so complicated that our simple frameworks are no match for solving them. The above are things that most people struggle with yet a single one can quickly ruin our frameworks. I'd argue that we see all of these points showing up in the arguments of this post (this rant is still rooted in the topic, just meta. I'm writing this so we can have better arguments).
[0] To help, let me give a very clear example of something almost trivial to determine but highly useful. Suppose your roomba constantly bumps into things near a door and those things move every single day. It is very likely that those are shoes. We now know to advertise a shoe rack so the person can organize their shoes at their door. Yes, there are more complicated examples where we can get more intimate details of ones life and sell more products, but the simplicity here is that there is noise that we can extract signal out of and in a way that purchasing behavior or online behavior wouldn't capture.
OK, I re-read this, it does read sort of confrontational. I actually probably agree with like 90% of what you are saying. Probably not really worth it to quibble on made up examples like this. I just want to emphasize that robotics in uncontrolled environments is very very hard.
What I'm getting at is, why do the hard robotics work to get a new stream of data when there are many streams that are already computer legible, probably give very similar insights *, and are more compact. The data is not useless, certainly not, but it's actually quite hard to obtain, even with the sensor kit this thing has.
If you were to focus your efforts on starving Amazon's insatiable consumer data appetite, the robot stuff they're talking about here should be very low on your priority list.
Your broader point definitely stands.
(*not precisely the same insights; I certainly see where you are going there!)
-----------------------------
I'm being overly specific to illustrate a point.
Try doing the shoe rack thing, I mean really try it. Is it really that easy? These shoes don't have barcodes the way things at the warehouse do, and the robots already screw that stuff up in the warehouse all the time. How much money will you make improving shoe rack recommendations by 2.5%? How could you come up with that number, which might justify such a project to Amazon executives, who are deciding what you work on? Why spend so much effort on the shoe thing when your robot is already running into the shoes!?
The big thing that I probably should have made clear is that robotics is really hard. Every single separate physical thing your robot runs into is difficult, and they're all different. It would take a lot of $$$ to nail the problem of determining that the thing you ran into is a pair of shoes, or that this area is the front door, or that you even ran into anything at all. Seriously!
Now, imagine putting the same number of statistics people, such as yourself, on a team in Amazon Healthcare. Or even just on a team that gets just 200 more people to sign up for Amazon Healthcare. I would be willing to bet that munging the data that comes out of that is simultaneously far easier to work with (no pesky physical reality!) and an order of magnitude more lucrative than any of these robot projects.
Amazon has five hundred open positions for data scientists. I assure you, none of them will be working on something like this. Not for a long time.
> I just want to emphasize that robotics in uncontrolled environments is very very hard.
I'm not sure what convinced you I was making this argument. My example was illustrative as a counter to *your example* of determining a specific dog breed. I'm trying to show an easier problem. But "easier" is comparative and doesn't mean the problem is "easy." I'm guessing this is the confusion? Let's be real, figuring out the dog breed by determining dog hair from other debris is substantially harder and I'm pretty sure you'd need a DNA scan. It would be near impossible (probably entirely) to differentiate hair of any type with current sensors. I don't actually think the shoe example is extremely hard considering these robots have lidar on them. Lidar can in fact tell you that something is roughly shoe shaped, so I'm not sure what your gripe is. No need for DNA scanning. No need for cameras or microphones. The problem is likely solvable given *existing instruments on commercially sold products.* This, again, doesn't mean the problem is "easy" though. Just that it can be solved.
> How much money will you make improving shoe rack recommendations by 2.5%?
Okay, but I'm assuming there's more than exactly one singular problem that the mapping can be solve. So I'm not sure what your point is.
Let's try a trivial example. One that *is easy* and will demonstrate that we can sell things beyond shoe racks with said data. Knowing the (approximate) square footage of your house is useful. For example, if you live in a 500sqft place, you can tell a lot about income because we know this is likely a small apartment. You probably can't afford a lot of stuff and Amazon probably shouldn't advertise luxury goods to you, especially large ones.
> Now, imagine putting the same number of statistics people, such as yourself, on a team in Amazon Healthcare.
I'm not sure why you're pigeon holling me and making this a zero sum game. I'm actively arguing an "and" position, not an "or" position. Yeah, health care is lucrative. But Amazon has an insane amount of wealth, more than they actually know what to do with. They are perfectly capable of being able to hire more than 200 positions for their robotics department, which is what they advertise on their robotics site. They are perfectly capable of increasing this number without taking away any funding from their health care side (not a zero sum game). I'd also assume that there's a significant amount of domain overlap considering that Roombas. Mapping warehouses is a pretty similar problem to mapping houses, so I'm not sure what the problem is.
So I still think your dog example is too complicated. All you need to know is if there's a 4 legged creature walking around. You can probably differentiate a cat from a dog here. You can also probably differentiate a small, medium, or large dog. You don't need to know the exact type for this data to be incredibly useful. Just knowing the size will get you a lot of useful data. It is really easy to over complicate the situation. A little data goes a long way.
It's true. Why is Amazon/Google/Facebook considered the evil triumverate of the panopticon and not JP Morgan Chase/Capital One/AmEx? These three know more about the US economy than the BLS or Dept of Commerce.
Why are you framing it as an "or" situation? I'm pretty confident most people dislike both these sectors. It is an "and" situation. Turning "ands" into "ors" is really whataboutism.
Given Amazon's reliance on consumer data and metrics, as well as their past behavior with alexa and echo I find this viewpoint to be almost stubbornly naïve.
Agreed. Somewhat mirroring the "Nothing to hide" argument [0] -- just because I'm currently not doing anything illegal, I'm ok with invasion of privacy.
Amazon et al, need data. Even though I can't think off the top of my head, how this data can be monetized, does not mean that someone with a correct incentive has not come up with a way to take advantage and abuse access to that data.
Within the next 15 years, Amazon will provide data gathered from Roomba LIDAR and/or Sidewalk[1] to police (with or without a warrant) which will tell them how many people are in a private home, and when.
1. Or whatever their blanket WiFi system that piggybacks on your bandwidth is called
Roomba doesn't have a Lidar vacuum,AFAIK, so I'm giving them 2-3 years to close the deal and requisite product development.
I know Amazon already has their heart in the wrong place (thanks to Ring LEO posture), buy it's going to take time for police departments to cotton-on to what is possible (likely from Amazon slides). The surveillance will be technically possible in 5 years, but adjusting human factors, I think the first such news stories may break in about 7 years, albeit poorly sourced. In 15 years, it will be common knowledge.
That said, you may take up sibling in their offer, as their are confident it's going to happen in 5 years.
same, but I'm upping to within 5 years. I do not think given the history with ring that it'll take very long. Anyone wanna bet 3 years? Also reasonable I think, but I'm staying at 5.
> Non-Reason #1: They want to sell your home information to the police state. Come on people, your local government already knows the layout of your home, you have to tell them that when you build it!
Amazon is not the state and gathering information on your home improves their chances to win in the smart home. Having access to your home network also helps.
The Roomba can also improve over time. If Amazon sees the Roomba is successful, then it will be considered more deeply for its strategic value. Given Amazon's willingness to fork over Ring data to police without a warrant, they don't have high credibility in my eyes for what they are or aren't willing to do to achieve any kind of advantage.
While I agree that #1 and #2 are the biggest drivers for acquiring Roomba, I find it hard to imagine Amazon executives not actively discussing in-home robotics as a vector for increased data collection. It might be a few years out, but it will happen.
Does anyone have any data on if Amazon robotics devs are treated any better than Amazon's reputation would imply?
I would fit squarely into this profile, but I didn't even bother applying. For context, I talked to over 20 bay area robotics companies, have upcoming on-sites at some of the self drivings and have passed technical interviews at other FAANGS. I've done everything from embedded computer vision / SLAM to drivers to kinematics.
Reason #2 - Nobody disagrees with this. The robots would probably clean better
Non-Reason #1 - There's a lot more information than the layout of the home which can be gathered by these robots. The layout of the home argument is a strawman. Of course the government knows how your rooms are partitioned. But the layout of your furniture, kids toys on the floor, water bowls for pets are just some of the things which can be detected just via blind exploration. The new models have cameras, I mean. And if you're saying 'but then all this data can already be inferred from your shopping history'. Yes, yes it can, but also another data point confirming speculative data can be valuable. Also, they can expose this data without your consent to the police and the data can be used against you in court. Think drug paraphernalia left of the floor or a stash of cash under your bed. Amazon's privacy policy states that they will share information with law enforcement in case of 'emergency'. A roomba with a camera turned on remotely is a wet dream for cops.
Non-Reason #2 - Yeah, for now.
Non-Reason #3 - `They already know this information` - they will know that information better. Whenever I hear this argument 'Oh, they already know'. No, they don't already 'know'. They have indicators about a particular piece of intelligence and now they'll have more. And the information you're talking about is the information which can be collected with the current sensors on the robot on the market. Who's to say what the future brings?
Reason #0 - That's incredibly reductionist about what a company the size of Amazon does. But sure, have it your way. They sell things. This will enable them to sell things better. But that doesn't dismiss the fact that Amazon did and does share your personal information with law enforcement without customer consent and without a warrant. And let's not forget, Amazon received the largest GDPR fine in history. I would not trust any of my data to Amazon, let alone invite them into my house.
Comments like yours, on a forum filled with people actually working on data collection related features makes me lose all hope that we'll actually reach a point in which the industry will side with the consumer.
Just to remind everyone about the 'this is fine..' comments. Amazon bought Ring: 'this is fine..' - shared footage with LEO agencies without a warrant and without consent. Amazon releases Alexa 'this is fine..' - 'Amazon and third parties are collecting and sharing Alexa voice interactions from Echo speakers with up to 41 different advertising partners'.
I'm fairly dubious that there's any useful data here. Square footage, bathroom, bedrooms, and other such stuff is public record. Getting the exact layout of my rooms and furniture doesn't seem to bring any obvious benefit. I guess maybe it can try and identify appliances and such but again not really seeing that as a hugely valuable trove of data.
I initially thought this, but the technology from competitors like Roborock (I have the S7 maxV) gives me pause: their more modern vacuums not only recognize furniture and layouts, including the chair layout, couch type etc... but they also detect and categorize specific objects you have lying around (it can distinguish shoes, animals, cables, power strips, blankets)... that data seems pretty useful alongside ambient information like temperature inside the house to me. Yes, it's possible to disable these features–but the robot is less useful without them, and it seems unlikely the average user would understand the implication.
If you can figure out what type of shoes[1] someone owns or that they have kids/a dog based on all the toys lying around, there's plenty of ad/behavioral data for free basically.
(I love the Roborock vacuum I have, and would find it hard to give it up even if Amazon acquired them too–it's really good. Thankfully, they have a good privacy focus right now and do state that these features don't share information with the company/stays local to the robot right now).
This is not a new observation, but damn, imagine how much engineering talent and human effort in general is devoted to the end goal of selling more shit.
Well, people want those things. Is there something inherently wrong with that, or do you just find it aesthetically displeasing? To me, this is a bit like complaining that so much talent in painting in the Renaissance went into religious art.
That's sort of a warmed over marxist critique. It gets presented at lot as fact without any real evidence and I find that hard to believe. As someone who works adjacent to advertising, it just doesn't seem all that effective. Most ads are basically just informational or reminders that a thing exists anyway.
There are a lot of different products because in advanced economies people have a lot of disposable income and credit is cheap. As such, consumer good proliferate.
A lot of intrusive and weird functionality comes bundled with products that consumers would not ask for individually. I can easily see someone wanting to by a little vacuum cleaner robot to keep the floors clean while at work - without realizing it has the ability to determine what kind of couch it is bumping into and relaying that information to some server somewhere.
Well sure, once you have a little computer and suite of sensors on the thing there are a lot of incentives to add crap onto it because the marginal costs are so low. Imagine you a PM or mid level exec at Robot Vacuums Inc and you want to advance your career and get a nice bonus. If you can push to get some cool sounding new feature onto the new model you might get promoted or a nice bonus. It probably won't improve sales and the customers don't want that feature but it doesn't hurt sales either so its easy to see how these things prliferate.
I think there's a little more nuance to this. In the engineer's head these things (dogs, shoes, etc) are technical challenges to overcome. It is part of the puzzle that drives engineers. I don't think they're thinking much about how this data can be used to sell more shit and spy on more people (plenty do, but you'll see even here on HN there's plenty of people saying it is "useless" data). So it isn't hard for a PM to say "Hey, can we record that data so we can improve our models" and then a marketer be like "Hey, if we're collecting this data, can we use it to sell more shit?"
It isn't a new observation (same way you get engineers to build weapons), but I'm laying it out more because I think it encourages engineers building stuff to understand how the data they are collecting to solve problems can also be abused (or how whatever you are making can be abused). Like another commenter said, you can turn off the features but they are less useful. Data is a double edged sword.
>If you can figure out what type of shoes[1] someone owns or that they have kids/a dog based on all the toys lying around, there's plenty of ad/behavioral data for free basically.
If you could actually do something useful with it people would give you the info. Like if you could provide shoe recommendations useful to someone they'd take 20 minutes and take pictures of all the shoes they have. But the state of the art is basically "I see you have brown shoes. Here's 1,000 random brown shoes".
This article is purely speculation. There nothing back up this claim. I have a Roomba and the map is mediocre at best.
Will they use iRobot's platform to sell their future data collection initiatives? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they didn't need this acquisition to sell newer products that does more mapping and data collection.
People write articles based on some random thought dump
Yes, I was thinking that. It's paywalled for me so I couldn't check if this was based on a leak or anything. I hope this is in the opinion section, because without any sources or leaks, it's just some made up garbage.
> I'm fairly dubious that there's any useful data here.
Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income, which usually is a superset of what you could spend in online purchases. Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes. I expect some more room for Roomba competitors here; certainly I wouldn't want a Amazon branded one even for free.
>Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income
okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
>Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes.
You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has.
"okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?"
- I've never found that ignoring one leak because there's another fixes the pipe.
"You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has."
- 20 years ago who would've thought that TV's would all be capturing your life on record. At best they can check what channel you're watching.
The concerns seem quite plausible: means, motive, and opportunity.
I think the metaphor here is that "sqft of house is visible" is less a pipe and more of a river?
Random ways I can think of to harvest sqft of your house:
1. Satellite
2. MLS records and/or building plans
3. Don't amazon drivers drive past like every single house at least once a day at this point? could probably do something with that.
Plus, I would be shocked if "amount you spend on amazon per month" doesn't nearly linearly correlate with your income, if that's what they want. Plus doesn't equifax et al literally sell these datasets for this explicit purpose?
I agree in principle that in general I do not want amazon to have an internet-connected LIDAR thingy mucking about my house, but also I struggle to figure out what specific privacy delta is happening here that would be a watershed moment.
TBH still kind of reeling that most TVs have microphones on them with no clearly policy that they're not always listening (vs phones get a lot more scrutiny) and things to that effect. If I were going to try to improve my privacy, moving to a dumb TV is probably something I'd do well before I got rid of my amazon-roomba.
Agreed regarding the fact that this is, at the moment, not the biggest privacy concern.
Of course, I also believe it should be packaged along with the other concerns, because I would argue that each of these capabilities can be called in security terms:
The cable operators have been knowing exactly what channel you are watching for longer than 20 years ago. Think back to how long ago you switched your old analog cable box for a fancy digital one. That's how long. If you're not old enough to know about analog cable boxes, then it has always been true for you.
TVs just introduced the potential for a camera/microphone and the manufacturer receiving that info directly instead of just the cable co.
>okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
That tells someone that you can afford to live in that zip code, but it doesn't tell them what you can afford to put in your home. Smart home devices, theoretically, "solve" that "problem".
At least where I live, I can go to an official government website and see exactly what someone’s home is valued at and how much they pay in property taxes just by searching their name and address.
You can get it directly off the MLS in many (US) states. Of course, a staged home may not provide the same quality of data that a view inside a lived-in house would, and if your home hasn't gone up for sale in a long time it may not have anything relevant to say. But the gaps in that dataset feel far smaller than the "I don't own a roomba" gap in this dataset.
1. Roomba iPad app requires an access to the location services on its first run.
You literally cannot be anything unless it can grab your location. It can be switched off afterwards however. To a fairly reasonable question of "Why is this required" their support replied "Don't like this? Tough life and fuck off." (rephrased for clarity).
2. Roombas have cameras and they refuse to run if these cameras are blocked.
My particular Roomba does not have cameras. It was a deciding factor in my decision of which model is right for me. There are other features that were originally only available on the models with cameras like being able to map a floor plan and then telling Roomba which specifi room to clean. However, a few months ago, a software update provided that feature to my model as well. I have to send it on a specific mapping routine, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing it. I probably won't ever now.
Amazon has shown us that even massive amount of data aren't that useful on their own. They can't even use their information about our online purchases in any meaningful way. Only book recommendations seems to work, but that's also pretty trivial to do.
The plans for my house isn't even secret, you can go to the county and get a copy for the cost to the paper. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but in what sense does the data collected by Roomba help you in anyway? Wifi coverage? Maybe they want to sell me an additional AP?
Just for some conspiratorial fun, what if you converted your house into a meth lab? You're just assuming that Rumba will use collision and move mapping. Pretty crude by tomorrow's standards. What is the evolving difference between innocent search for marketing purposes vs search for illegal use, the consumer of the data product?
Sure, technically the data is available at every town hall. But the process of collecting and collating it is vastly different than the process of collecting it from an active mobile sensor kit in every home.
Collecting official records required paid workers scaling linearly with every record, and yields info that is out of date at best (how many small renovations are done without permits?).
In contrast, with these devices, your target pays you to buy and run the device, and it automatically collects live-up-to-the-minute data merely incidental to the standard operation of the device.
Car analogy: Police can technically observe every speeding incident and issue tickets, but it scales only with the hours worked. Change that to collecting data from every car's internal sensors (engine RPM, gear, wheel speed, GPS location, etc.) and issuing tickets for every infraction. Most of us would get five tickets from the first commute vs likely going more than five years without one.
Technically the exact same data availability, but the process of collecting it has insanely different results.
On top of that, Amazon knows your address... looking up your home value on Zillow (or whatever the enterprisey equivalent is) is going to be a better proxy than training vacuums to surreptitiously read 401k statemenrs
Isn't speculation half the game in the data business though? You're probably never quite sure what data will be useful in 5-10 years. What's more, if you wait to build the data gathering aparatus until you know what you need you'll almost certainly end up behind someone else.
I think it's probably wise to see most acquisitions these days as a possible long term data play or even as a serendipitous one.
I think the default stance on data collection that we don't necessarily see as "useful data" should be caution. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean much... we are probably missing something (or underestimating future usefulness). Better to take a strict approach now than try to patch things later once the penny drops and we "get it".
This is very much one of those just because you can't think of something does not mean someone else hasn't already. It's more along the lines of you're just not practiced enough.
If your place was listed on Zillow/Redfin/Streeteasy/etc then they already have a detailed floorplan. Idk what they are going to learn about where you put your couch.
It's better to have a DB of the relative size of people's homes than not. You could map it against a DB of their shopping habits. As someone who lives in a condo I can tell you too many furniture manufacturers design their furniture or appliances to be WAYYYY too big. So maybe product managers or portfolio managers can push for SKUs that work for more customer segments.
You may be right that the utility is limited. But in the surveillance economies of Google, Amazon and Facebook more data is better.
Probably. But that doesn't mean that it was the driving force behind the acquisition. Amazon, Google & Apple are all in a battle for the home automation ecosystem. They each want use to use Siri/Alexa/Assistant to control your tv, doorbell, security cams, and more. This seems like another product to add to that ecosystem.
Are there any servers and firmware that I can use to replace the software on my Roomba?
I spent nearly $1k on my Roomba. As a single person with a dog, it helps me a lot. My allergies aren't nearly as bad, I don't have to vacuum by hand nearly as much. I liked that with the map the bot was a lot smarter and didn't bump into or damage my things.
I feel like by selling to a company like Amazon that the rug is being pulled out from beneath me. I am truly disappointed in this move and all the people involved.
I have a Dreame Z10 that's self emptying and has lidar/vision to avoid bumping (and it works well!). I've replaced the firmware with Valetudo so I've got full, local control with no cloud at all.
This is the model I bought as well. Was only $500 as of a few weeks ago, which is unbeatable for self-emptying with LIDAR. The rooting/Valetudo install process was super easy. Now it’s on a VLAN with no internet access.
> I feel like by selling to a company like Amazon that the rug is being pulled out from beneath me. I am truly disappointed in this move and all the people involved.
How so? What promises were made by iRoomba when you bought it about their intent (or not) to sell the company? How is this sale tangibly affecting you?
This feels like a gross overreaction that's typical of online statements to garner as much of a reaction from other readers as possible.
I don't care that they're selling. I do care, in this case, that they're selling to a company that will use this data for non-diagnostics and non-robot functionality. That's why I said it feels like having the rug pulled out from under me.
> What promises were made by iRoomba when you bought it about their intent (or not) to sell the company
Pretty explicit ones about not selling a map of my house.
> How is this sale tangibly affecting you?
I already explained this, it's unclear why you're asking again.
> This feels like a gross overreaction that's typical of online statements to garner as much of a reaction from other readers as possible.
I mean, you didn't even bother reading up on the promises Roomba has made to end users, Amazon's fairly explicit rejection of in-home privacy, and you're scolding me for sounding reactive.
I didn't ask for the company not to be sold, I said I was disappointed. I didn't say "I'm throwing my device away", I asked if I can run it locally. How much more reserved do you want me to be?
What does "revoke its IP address" even mean? Do you mean have it return 0.0.0.0 for all *.roomba.com domains? How would that solve anything? I suspect it'll actually make the Roomba not work at all.
I think it just means preventing it from being on the wifi at all (revoking local IP address) which would definitely kill anything that requires internet access.
Do roombas need WiFi access or do they use their own whispernet-like mobile data connection? I fear the day when appliances will connect to the internet through their own means.
With the Neato, it can still be used, but you'd lose all of the mapping features in the app. It'd take away no-go zones, which are tremendously helpful in making these useful in a lot of homes.
Amazon wants to provide total home automation solutions: Ring/Blink for security and doorbells and lighting, Alexa for automation, etc. At one point they even recommended Alexa as the glass break sensor for the Ring Alarm, although they eventually made a standalone device.
"Alexa, vacuum the living room" is a nice feature and they can provide that by integrating with Roomba.
Home mapping is not as valuable as that kind of integration, and I seriously doubt that home mapping is why Amazon is doing this.
The regular old Roomba has a bumper on the front as the only sensor. There's no camera. Some models have LIDAR but that's not able to tell the difference between types of obstacles (like knowing a floor is covered in toys as the article suggests).
This is dishonest "journalism". Amazon might be evil and is out to get as much data on you as possible, but let's be real about what is possible.
Modern version do indeed map out your house. No cameras needed.
How do I know this? The app associated with our roomba shows the map it's created of our house. And its incredibly accurate, especially since it encourages us to tag spaces in order to set up intelligent vacuuming schedules (i.e. less in the laundry room, more in the kitchen/dining rooms).
It's even smart enough to identify temporary obstacles (like toys) and permanent obstacles.
I don't deny that even the basic model can figure out the layout of your house.
It can't determine materials. The lidar can't really do that either. Even if it could, whether you buy Charmin or generic toilet paper on Amazon is a better signal of your wealth anyway. Honestly just buying a Roomba is a pretty good signal that you have some money to burn but not so much that you can hire a maid.
> The j7 and j7+ model, available only from iRobot in September 2021, debuted PrecisionVision
Yeah, they have cameras in 'em - they advertise being able to detect pet poop, a material.
> Honestly just buying a Roomba is a pretty good signal that you have some money to burn but not so much that you can hire a maid.
Dismissive and also untrue. Roombas save time by spending a relatively small amount of money - about the same amount of money you'd spend on a good vacuum.
The past isn't exactly an indicator of the future, though. Competition like Roborock's vacuums are laden with cameras and can do full object categorization, including furniture type and layout, but also what's lying around anywhere up to waist height. Mine has detected shoes, cables, power strips, pets, clothes, toys and so on–that is pretty useful data and tells you A LOT about the house and its owner–pretty easy to imagine them eventually detecting the brand of the shoe and how worn it is or something.
If Roomba isn't working on something like this, given the competition is clearly much further ahead, I'd be completely surprised.
Other posters have pointed out that newer high-end $1000 Roombas do have cameras and some of those features you mention, but they make up a small portion of the Roomba fleet. The article is suggesting Amazon bought iRobot for access to that tiny amount of data. There's just no way that's the primary motivator. It makes so much more sense to think about this acquisition from the "consolidating household smart-device offerings under the Alexa brand" perspective.
I don't disagree, but I see it as more of a forward-looking acquisition, not a backwards looking one. Sure, they don't have the data now but It's easy to imagine Amazon killing off the old basic models in the future and selling the data-gathering camera-enabled ones at a loss, to kill off the competition and get much larger market share, once it's acquired the company. Why wouldn't they?
Honestly, this is spoken like someone who has never used a robotic vacuum. Unless you vacuum your house daily, it helps your house look a whole lot better. Visible dirt on the floor has a bigger impact on the look (and frankly hygiene) your house than you might imagine. And even if you do vacuum your house daily, the robotic vacuum will save you hours of time every week.
That said, if you don't care about visible dirt on your floors, perhaps you're right, it won't improve your life.
My wife bought a Roomba a few years ago. The thing is noisy, and as it bumps around the room like a blind man it frequently gets stuck in a corner or under a chair, or ingests a shoelace from a shoe that someone took off near the front door and then calls for help.
I don't vacuum every day, but do it often enough with a standard canister vac. It takes a few minutes per room, and then it's done. I can also use the vacuum to get cobwebs out of the wall corners and along the ceiling. I can use it to get dust off of other surfaces. I can use it to vacuum out my car. It's a really nice vacuum, quiet, with a powerful suction, HEPA filter, and it cost less than all but the lowest-tier Roomba.
At what point can we just conclude we are living in a dystopia? Seems pertinent to note that one of the hallmarks of many fictional dystopias is that most folks don't even recognize there is a problem!
There are useful ways of calling things out for being "dystopian" but it can also invoke a clarity that is necessary for narrative fiction, but not necessarily a useful lens for specific real life events. The line between a good shorthand and a thought-terminating cliche can be kind of blurry.
I've never heard of a dystopia you could opt out of by simply not buying a consumer product. 1984 and Brave New World would have been very short books if that was the definition of a dystopia.
the 'don't collect and correlate data about me' tax is getting pretty high. but for now you can still pay it. no plane travel. can't use a cell phone. no online purchases. obviously no rewards systems. no credit cards.
This exactly. Trying to live outside the collection is very difficult.
A few years ago non-smart phones became untenable for use in basic civil society.
More recently, an older smart phone or without face/touch enabled became hard to use.
Recently, in cities like NY, due to QR-ification, going out without a smart phone meant issues getting menus.
Now, the big ones are starting: end of cash, and civil life tracking. The NYC oyster-card equivalent for subways is per-user and sells data, per the ToS. The tap-to-pay subway turnstiles log per-station use (and therefore your travel) for your credit card provider. Many restaurants can’t do cash easily bc the proliferation of Square and what overworked civil servant is going to force mom and pop coffee shops to take cash? The laws on this got hazy a while back anyway. TSA/clearcheck or w/e in airports that use biometrics. Opt out options, besides being inconvenient, label you as what to the TSA? Drivers license photos are auto-sold to CBP facial rec tools and similar. Where is the opt out for that?
This isn’t conspiratorial. it’s just the slow march of clever tech that works well so people who don’t understand the privacy tradeoffs or don’t care buy it, the purchase defines network effects which defines implied user preferences which defines new product choices which defines larger networks… which becomes more and more difficult to opt out of.
If you claim this isn’t happening you don’t understand data eng and tech as a whole. The only thing saving us rn is the data eng part is really hard still.
Sure, at the start. What about once every kind of product has some kind of irrevocable phone home surveillance? Eventually natural turnover would mean even the used market doesn't have much suitable if you want to avoid it.
The article is speculative in nature, despite an obviously unreachable conclusion being the title. As a result I think it's good to be cautious in relying on it for claims, particularly wide ones
From the article: "The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth."
Amazon already has your address - so they already can get detailed maps of your house, tax records, likely income, and on and on, from other records. They can link to all your public data (Linked In, FB, Zillow, whatever else is for sale) to build massive profiles of you, your purchase history, your neighbor's purchase history, and so on).
This purchase is more likely to get more robot expertise, patents, and capability as they want to automate more of their entire pipeline of moving goods. That is where the big money is. Saving a few percent on a several hundred billion pipeline via automation is massive.
I have a couple of Roombas, but I'm glad I still have older non-mapping, non-internet connected ones. I got them because I didn't want to have to rely on some app that could get discontinued or have to deal with Wifi. I never through Roomba would get acquired like this.
Looks like I'll have to switch to a different brand when they break (or try to keep them going, years ago I saw something about people rebuilding the Roomba gearbox with metal gears instead of plastic).
The name Proteus must be a reference to Player Piano by Vonnegut. The main character, Paul Proteus, oversees a large industrial facility in a world where largely all work has been automated away.
It's more than that. First, they will put Alexa on it, so you have it everywhere in your home.
Then, they will fill it with as many sensors as they can do give you extra information. It will protect your home against burglars, survey your kids, prevent your cat to scratch the sofa, etc.
And with the camera, microphone, lidar and so on, people will happily let the little bugger record their entire life.
This will create the most reliable database about consumers including their money, interests, brand loyalty, level of education, people they meet, life rhythm, etc. This alone will make a lot of money.
Eventually, it will play contextual ads, in your home.
And of course, each one is an entry point for the Amazon domotic ecosystem, giving even more of your life to Amazon.
> "One such demographic that seems to often run into trouble when using Valetudo is apple users. (I know, right?) Specifically, those fully invested into the Apple Ecosystem and way of life."
I have macs and iPhone - so is this some technical issue with the hardware or a snark on (some) people's attitude?
I had always thought Amazon already owned iRobot. It matches Amazon's existing smart home product line and has a lot of advertisements on Amazon. Speaking so confidently about this being some gather as much data from your home possible play feels like a way of getting clicks via perpetuating the "big tech bad" narrative.
They should have done a deal with Xiaomi or one of the other Chinese brands instead. They're honestly light-years ahead with indoor mapping & navigation.
I bought a top-of-the-line Roomba when I moved to London a few years ago and it's honestly primitive by comparison to even a mid-range Xiaomi robot vac.
> They should have done a deal with Xiaomi or one of the other Chinese brands instead.
Now this is quite a bad take. 100% those Chinese brands are working side step with the military.
Remember, they have no qualms about violating human rights. Marxism's conundrum is that there is no difference between all humans being equal vs not important.
Honestly, Amazon having the floorplan to my house concerns me far more than the PLA having it. If a state actor wanted the floorplan to my house, they don't need a backdoor to my robot vac to find it out.
Yeah. :/ Well, I suppose I'll have to consider if one of the two "smart" devices needs to go, then.
It's a bit disturbing just how much you can tell about a house from the floorplan alone, much less if you've set out to use the camera for data collection. I wasn't a huge fan of iRobot's data collection, but now that it'll be going to Amazon, ugh.
This is just the end point for any modern gadget. To work against you, to collect data to be used to break your will and make you spend more money to the profit of a handful of big tech companies. Such utopia. Much wow!
Roborock have a better privacy story, but how long it stays that way would be pure speculation. It might possibly become a selling point, much like Apple did [in the past].
In addiction to the stats in the register article, apparently principals of schools that use one of the surveillance platforms are routinely sent copies of sexts that minors sent from personal devices. (Can’t find the quote at the moment…).
Spyware on school chromebooks are snooping SMS on undisclosed models of phones if you use the chromebook USB port to charge the phone (even after school hours).
https://www.vacuumsguide.com/privacy-robot-vacuum-cleaners/
This was already on the radar 5 years ago. Pretty useful data for companies like Ikea to know how people fill their spaces. I am curious if other data is sucked up (now or in the near future). Bluetooth devices in the same room? Wifi SSIDs for precise location?
All potentially useful data for a company like Amazon.
I've had a Roomba for years and love it; I was considering upgrading to the newest model this year (mainly for the self-emptying bin) and getting one of the mopping models as well. Now after hearing this news I'm hesitant.
A few years ago, right before the start of the pandemic, I had the opportunity to play with an Oculus Quest for a weekend. I loved it. If it wasn't a Facebook product I would have bought one immediately.
My guess is Amazon could easily figure out the information a roomba could provide without it (sq ft, etc) which makes me think the title of this article is false.
There are 4 news organizations saying the same thing. A lot of great reasons on here why they would be interested - robotics expertise, great business that has struggle recently, etc.
I think another big reason is putting it at the top of all searches within their app and website. They can sell more by doing that and get a return on investment very quickly.
If Chinese companies are collecting this data already, not sure why we would fear Amazon having it.
If you have a roomba, I would think you could block its internet access on your router via its mac address.
But for people with Comcast, I wonder if blocked if it could access what I call the "secret wide-open Concast Router" every Comcast Customer has. Sure there are ways around that.
I would speculate this would be much more beneficial for putting Amazon logo/brands onto roomba and or improving warehouse drones than the claim of household mapping. People love roomba, Amazon loves buying functional brands that can be absorbed into the ecosystem.
What does your house look like. What items are in your house (the j- models of Roombas include cameras for object identification). These give Amazon additional leverage in building a customized marketing campaign to your eyeballs.
This seems dubious. Having a in-market consumer brand with millions of customers is much more valuable than being able to get X% better at targeted recommendations.
It's worth noting: Her "thing" isn't that data is being collected per se, it's that such data is often used against us. So while it's easy to rationalize it with "I've nothing to hide", the Amazons of the world are not countering with "We've only your best interests in mind, certainly not our own."
That is, the relationship is asymmetrical, to put it kindly.
I was briefly in the "I've nothing to hide" camp. To put it more concretely, I didn't actually believe it, but I couldn't pinpoint what's wrong with it.
What did it for me is manipulation - everyone can be manipulated with enough knowledge and effort, regardless of how smart they think they are. If you think that you're environment and what you see doesn't affect you, you're just plain lying to yourself. Collecting all this data massively increases the knowledge and reduces the effort necessary for those companies to manipulate you. Manipulate you to buy stuff. Manipulate you to engage, a.k.a. give your time away to make them money and so on.
That's the crux of surveillance capitalism. You're the product and eventually its victim.
Having read the book mentioned, I'd take it a step further and frame the current Gov v Big Tech struggles as Gov realizing that it's losing its grip on control (to Big Tech). So while it might be framed in other ways, ultimately Gov doesn't want to lose its status quo powers.
"You're the product" doesn't really give the vibe I want it to. It sounds like someone is making money off of you, which is true, but it doesn't convey the "at your own expense" part. Even by simple things as better targeting, but eventually as main goals or side-effects of better ML/AI, you're manipulated to spend more, to feel worse about yourself so you spend more and so on. There was recently another article about "insight porn". If someone wants your attention and time, that's another way to take it. The better you know someone, the better you can convince them to give you money and time. So whether you're the product or not, you're paying for it.
Not only that, but this stuff doesn't need to be 100% effective for it to have massive consequences. If amazon can use data about people to swing 5% of votes, the vast majority of politicians would give them pretty much anything in their power.
I think using arguments like "Amazon swinging votes" is bad, since it's easily countered with "Amazon is not interested in political elections". Amazon doing whatever they can to take more and more money from you, way beyond your means? Americans (figuratively, some) are already up to their eyeballs in debt. Amazon being able to make it much worse is already a huge drain on society. "A boring dystopia".
It would be a massive oversight to claim "Amazon is not interested in political elections". Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a reason. Influencing politics is part of the way they take your money. Manufactured consent, political suppression, corporate lobbying, these are all things that every single Fortune 100 company is engaging in heavily at this point.
> what's the downside to my home automation knowing
Nothing. But, it's not just your home automation. It's the biggest retailers (and one of the bigger ad brokers) in the world knowing the layout of your house, including images of objects in your house if you have a newer version.
So, really, it depends on how comfortable you are with Amazon having all that data on you for the secondary purpose of bringing their marketing power to bear against you.
Even if they don't today - if all image recognition is done on the machine (which is frankly unlikely) - nothing stops a software update from changing this.
That's one of the boons of technology that's also a bust. There's no technological barriers to changing how a product behaves.
Reason #1: Amazon needs robotics people badly. Roomba has a lot of robotics people and expertise. It's a natural fit, and an easy way to acquire a bunch of fully functional robotics teams.
Reason #2: Vacuum robots are useful things, especially for people with pets, which is probably most Amazon customers. Chinese companies are eating Roomba's lunch when it comes to cleaning robots (and Amazon knows it!), so Amazon probably thinks they can compete, win, and yield profit on this investment. They'll do it by leveraging their existing warehouse expertise to help the robot clean your house better.
Non-Reason #1: They want to sell your home information to the police state. Come on people, your local government already knows the layout of your home, you have to tell them that when you build it!
Non-Reason #2: They want to look at products in your home to sell you stuff. Sorry, the embedded systems that are going to be on these things are going to be able to recognize "fridge," "bed," "power strip." Not "Miele SKU #7560, Brand New Condition" or "IKEA Krugsforst Chair, Tattered Underfabric". They are running mobilenet on 512x512 thumbnails, not efficientdet-v7 on 12 megapixel raw input. There is no GTX3080 on board this thing, and they're not gonna stream a high resolution video to AWS. And Lidar cannot tell what color your shoes are, or even that the point cloud is a pair of shoes.
Non-Reason #3: They want to know what you own so that they can determine some other information about you. Uh, this thing is going to connect to your router, see a MacBook Pro, and a Sonos speaker connected, and subsequently know your monthly disposable income to the $10's. They already know this information -- they don't to do a bunch of extremely difficult statistics on the huge amount of data this thing could generate to figure these things out.
Reason #0: Amazon sells things. This is a thing they can sell. You'll probably buy this thing after they acquire it, make it better, and market it to you.