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).

[1] https://twitter.com/ow/status/1555588525982363648

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.

A lot of those wants wouldn't exist without advertising

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.

Well selling shit is what pays salaries. It's the entire reason the job to exists in the first place.

Its really depressing. Could be working towards solving real world problems. But hey. Capitalism has got to get its pound of flesh.

>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".

Jeez, so Black Mirror-ish.

It’s Alexa with wheels.

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

>This article is purely speculation.

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.

Fair points, a counter:

"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:

violations of the principle of least privilege

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.

> okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?

Which would be much better, as that give you data on everyone, not just those owning Roombas.

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You're right, I assumed similar things existed everywhere -- obviously unverified / easily incorrect.

TBH, this seems a little imaginary to me. I'm thinking they get far better data just from knowing my address and what types of things I buy there now.

They already have brilliant insights like, "you buy robot vacuums or accessories for them"? Hmm, maybe we should be in this space.

Reality is pretty boring.

>Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income

aren't Credit Reporting companies already selling that data?

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.

The credit card people provide details on what/where/when/how much was purchased. The "loyalty" programs at stores tell them exaclty what items.

>Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba

They could hire Roomba vacuum drone pilots for like $2 an hour!

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.

2. Some Roombas have cameras.

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.

I think just scanning WiFi/LAN/Bluetooth for MAC addresses through their smart speakers would be a better indicator of disposable income.

Heck, if they already have access to your Amazon purchases and the Roomba model you own they probably have a good idea of your income bracket.

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.

> It's better to have a DB of the relative size of people's homes than not.

Of course, but is it better to have a DB of the relative size of peoples’ homes—or $1.7 billion?

You have a space next to your couch that could be occupied by a side table. Here's a few suggestions:

Wait until they put more sensors on it...