Teslas send loads of stuff back to Tesla servers which I'd assume are in the U.S. It's not an unusual thing to do in this cloud-happy day and age.

It's not a debate over whether the US hoovers up information. Most of this US vs China debate centers on one thing: which side do you want to give your information to. That is what is being argued over; that dispute is going to get worse for a while yet as China pushes outward globally in its tech ambitions.

The better alternative: I don't want anyone to have my information - unfortunately is largely not going to be an option. The choice will mostly be between the US and China (or in some cases, European tech providers, which will frequently work with the US). If it's not already that way, it certainly is going to be in the next 10 or 20 years.

The issue is that everyone's burned out by ridiculously long overly-broad EULAs written in impenetrable legalese. The general sentiment even, here on HN where people should know better, is "sure, they SAY they can do those things but (it's just boilerplate | they wouldn't really ever do that stuff | they really just meant this much more benign thing | they need that access to provide the product | it helps them debug problems)". And then people act all shocked when, once again, a company does precisely what it told you it was going to do.

A classic example is the "we collect your data to provide X service" / "you can disable service X" that we see all over the place. Everyone reads it as "you can disable data collection" but that's not what it says, and it's not what really happens.

The better alternative is to not accept this kind of invasiveness but the ease and convenience of giving in is too seductive for most people, so we invent a comfort belief that it's somehow benign or at worst irrelevant.

Sure, I can imagine that's fine for car telemetry and you enter into that knowing. It's common technology, even pool cars will have a black logging box. Do I expect a device in my home to be mapping out the floorspace and sending that back to unknown parties (whatever the location) without consent? Then no, that's different.

They're covered in cameras too. Imagine finding out your car has been uploading photos of the security detail inside your embassy. Pooh-poohing it away as "car telemetry" is like calling Cambridge Analytica's shenanigans "gathering metrics".

Tracking every move outside of your house is A-OK but knowing your floorplan is unimaginable?

Why?

We're talking national security. I hope nobody is running a Xiaomi robot vacuum at a sensitive or classified site, or any other brand of robot vacuum for that matter...

There's a difference between individual invasions of privacy and national security. There's definitely Chinese apps that invade your privacy. There's also Western apps that do too. The question is of national security however.

> I hope nobody is running a Xiaomi robot vacuum at a sensitive or classified site, or any other brand of robot vacuum for that matter...

Remember when Strava's heatmap of running tracks leaked information about military bases? https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/957318498102865920

Observing private homes can help select your targets. By observing the inside of the home you may learn if the owner has access to secrets (national security or commercial), what kind and what level. From where you can switch to traditional methods. My 2c.

It gives you the layout of homes, it doesn't allow you to observe their occupants. It is a spinning laser.

Add voice control ("Hey Robot, run a sweep") and WiFi and you have a very capable spy system. Not to mention cameras and GPS which could all be justified in terms of improving the performance of robot vacuums.

There is a difference, and individual privacy is more important.

"National security" is a vague term that is always abused to make money, take away liberties or kill people.

That was Roomba, owned by the American company iRobot.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/roomba-irobot-...

I saw this via BBC Click, this weekend. There was a room full of IoT devices and they were showing how chatty they all were via wireshark. They specifically said floormaps had been found being sent back to servers in CN.

I saw a lot of concern about sending data to servers in a specific location such as CN. However, there is no such thing as Custom for Data. So, I think sending data to either CN or any other place is not much different.

Data is subject to export restrictions and customs same as anything else. Some countries even mandate where and how data must be stored.

Sources?

It was on this week's BBC Click program, there was a full room of IoT devices with wireshark showing their packet traces.