The company which will completely ignore keywords like "6A" in a desperate attempt to show you anything but what you're looking for.
I'm not so worried!
Added: this is also the company which sells a popular line of home-security cameras, some of which are meant to be installed indoors. Worrying about your vacuum snitching on you makes good sci-fi but maybe this product isn't where regulators should be focusing.
Frankly, calling it Bezos's Razor would be very appropriate, because that's basically how the whole Amazon storefront works.
Pretty detailed. I used to own one of the high-end Roombas that would show you a map of your house, and the wifi signal strength in all the nooks and crannies (really quite useful when you move to a new home).
It doesn't show what kind of chair you have or what you have on the walls, or anything like that. But it's not hard at all to determine the size of the rooms, the layout, the placement of key pieces of furniture, and similar things. From the way a home is arranged and the amount of furniture, I can easily think of ways that the map could be used to infer information about a home. (Larger couch and entertainment center may indicate someone more interested in consuming media. Individual chairs around a smaller coffee table — perhaps they like entertaining.)
The maps are far from accurate, since there are a number of problems with a Roomba building a full map: Closed doors; areas cordoned off by lighthouses; unless you put blue painter's tape over the sensors, Roomba thinks rugs with black in them are cliffs.
But the maps don't have to be prefect to be very revealing. Especially since the higher-level Roombas have cameras on them. I don't know how detailed the images they capture are, but even if they are only vague monochrome blurs, that's enough to determine patterns of activity in the house. (Family regularly comes home at 5pm? Start advertising dinner food on partner web sites and apps.)
In fact, iRobot requires the access to the location services to initialize their iOS apps, so even without a map this would allow Amazon to link an IP address to the exact property. Creative abuse of this combo can go a very long way.
Of course, availability through an API can greatly expand how the information is used but, for the most part, it's tricky to say that data is public but you have to make it painful to access.
> it would allow Amazon to jack up the prices for amazon.com queries from the same IP address if the place, say, is really big.
Afaik this sort of airline-style price discrimination is not something amazon engages in ever. Maybe I’m misinformed
If the advertising world believes that targeted ads are the holy grail, then why wouldn't retailers believe targeted pricing to be also be the holy grail?
My personal belief is that if Amazon tried what you’re suggesting, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot (lose any remaining customer trust, regulators would be all over them, and competitors like Walmart would use it to gain market share overnight). In fact I was really hoping you’d share an article describing Amazon doing this so I have justification to cancel prime, ha!
However, if Amazon was really wanting to do this, they already know the avg income on everyone of their customers that have an Amazon credit card. That would be the ultimate in targeted pricing. Not just Amazon, any store branded card.
A few years ago I would have probably agreed. But modern machine learning can draw spooky inferences from seemingly sparse data, on a scale that makes it practical. As the roomba bumps around a room it will learn where obstacles are but not what those obstacles are. But the size and shape of the footprint of those obstacles probably contains enough information to make guesses at what those might be. Approximate identification of some obstacles as couches is probably possible, just from the size and shape, and likely the position of those obstacles in the room.
That won't tell you how old the couch is, or whether it's worn out or not, but if the roomba can't find any probable couches in that person's house, advertising couches to that person may pay off.
Also, did the roomba start finding a new room recently, but the other rooms have remained the same? That person may have build an addition to their house, or started furnishing their basement. Did all the rooms change but the roomba is still paired to the same smartphone? They may have moved into a new home. In either case, if the new room[s] don't have couch-shaped obstacles, advertise couches.
And this is just with the bumpers. If Amazon adds a camera to roombas, the snooping potential is obvious.
My best guess for this is that floor plans and furniture can be used to _fingerprint_ a user, rather than knowing that the user owns a couch so that The Company can recommend a particular CPG. Knowing who their target demographics are with greater accuracy certainly feeds back into their recommender systems, but not so directly, which makes me concerned for this investigation's success.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/02/amazons-ftc-problem...
The key paragraph:
"Among the concerns the FTC is investigating is whether the data generated about a consumer’s home by iRobot’s Roomba vacuum will give it an unfair advantage over a wide variety of other retailers. That concern was voiced by multiple critics of the deal when it was first announced early this month. For example, Amazon could have an advantage with a consumer looking to buy a couch, by using detailed home maps generated by iRobot to suggested particular items."
How detailed are the maps? I'm assuming they're using SLAM. [1] If so, the maps aren't that detailed, and I struggle to see how the maps will give them an unfair _retail_ advantage.
I do get the need for the review, it's just this point that doesn't make sense to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...