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How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

technologyreview.com

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Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#21

Post by echelon »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #4

Key paragraph for our friends who don’t RTFA > iRobot … confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020. All of them came from “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,” the company said in a statement. They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging…

Everyone RTFA in this case!

I did not expect to see actual photos of the woman sitting on the toilet in this article. But damn, they're real and published dead center. It's awful and voyeuristic to feature, but in a way it brings to life the freakishly perverse Orwellian horror of all of this.

This piece hits hard, as it should.

How did neither Roomba nor ScaleAI have safeguards against PII of this nature? This is inside people's intimate spaces. It could have been sex. Or children. How did they not think of this?

This sort of disregard for privacy should be punished, and this woman should be able to sue Roomba and ScaleAI for a handsome sum.

Maybe they did have some kind of internal data privacy policy or 3rd party policy, but it was wholly inadequate.

My team once had a certain perennial Billboard chart topper's login credentials due to suspected mishandling by one of their team (I'm still afraid to say whom), but you'd better believe we treated it - and all of our customer data - as sacred taboo. Mishandling PII was fireable at minimum, and could probably land us in litigation with a permanent mark against our careers.

We need GDPR/CCPA++ protections here. As an added bonus, the companies that play nice will get a comfortable moat in the form of their compliance.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#22

Post by gretch »

karmakaze wrote: post #18
gretch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article and I don’t think your interpretation of the “suggested” narrative is there. The title is “ A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?”. That’s not really implying a “they’re watching you narrative” - who’s “they” and if it’s global syndicate why did they do something as innocuous as putting it on Facebook? But yes, the real story is that training data (and “re…

The part that's missing is that it isn't just "a Roomba", it's "a Roomba labelled with “video recording in progress”". Saying 'a Roomba' implies that it could've been done from any Roomba.

The article addresses this head on. Even though those users once consented to share data “It’s not expected that human beings are going to be reviewing the raw footage.”

The meat of the article is that what technology and tech companies are doing is divorced from the expectations that we have as a society.

It couldn’t have been done from any roomba, but it could happen to almost everyone who didn’t understand the exact ramifications (which we click through several of every year to try to get the vacuum up and running). That’s why a lot of ppl on HN put masking tape over their laptop webcam. Or are you calling those people paranoid?

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#23

Post by outworlder »

tintor wrote: post #15

Why does a Roomba need a camera looking UP? Why are they labeling furniture in home that Roomba can't possibly reach from the floor?

That's for navigation. You want to be able to tell it to 'clean the living room', it needs to know what the living room is(or some of the landmarks). The robots are low on the ground, so tilting the camera up helps.

That's not the only approach though. You can look forward (or just use lidar), but this navigation approach seems to be less sensitive to, say, furniture been moved around.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#24

Post by butlerm »

hobbitstan wrote: post #7

Yeah, I’m not sure I buy their explanation about special development roombas since they offered zero proof. I have an ancient Roomba that’s still going and dread having to replace it one day.

There is no possible way they could prove anything about this in a form adequate for a short article. You either trust that the writers are responsible journalists representing the truth of the matter to the best of their ability or you don't.

That goes for the device manufacturer as well. They couldn't possibly prove the fidelity of their statements except on a witness stand under the penalty of perjury. So unless you think they are conducting the type of conspiracy that could see some of them sent to prison, we might just have to trust that they don't defraud the public on a regular basis.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#25

Post by jonas21 »

The question I want to ask is: how did Roomba-recorded photos end up in a major publication on the Internet?

And the sequence seems to be:

1. iRobot hires people to use special development versions of the Roomba in their homes to collect training data. These are clearly labeled, and the participants are informed that the images are being sent to iRobot for training. This seems fine - if you want to exchange some degree of privacy for money, that should be your right as long as you're clearly informed about it.

2. A contractor posts some of these photos to a private Facebook group used by other contractors on the project. This is obviously bad, but at the same time, it's limited in scope to people who would have had access to these photos or similar ones.

3. The MIT Technology Review gets a hold of these images and decides to publish them on the Internet for everyone to see, just to get more clicks on their article. This feels like the most egregious privacy violation in the sequence.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#27

Post by smohare »

gretch wrote: post #8
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #4

Key paragraph for our friends who don’t RTFA > iRobot … confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020. All of them came from “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,” the company said in a statement. They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging…

I read the article and I don’t think your interpretation of the “suggested” narrative is there. The title is “ A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?”. That’s not really implying a “they’re watching you narrative” - who’s “they” and if it’s global syndicate why did they do something as innocuous as putting it on Facebook? But yes, the real story is that training data (and “re…

No post body was provided.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#28

Post by bonestamp2 »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #4

Key paragraph for our friends who don’t RTFA > iRobot … confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020. All of them came from “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,” the company said in a statement. They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging…

I had a beta unit before they released the first AI powered model and my beta unit was set to upload to photos. The original goal was to use AI to recognize and avoid things that the vacuum can get caught up in, such as cords under desks and dog poop.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#29

Post by twelve40 »

gretch wrote: post #8
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #4

Key paragraph for our friends who don’t RTFA > iRobot … confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020. All of them came from “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,” the company said in a statement. They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging…

I read the article and I don’t think your interpretation of the “suggested” narrative is there. The title is “ A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?”. That’s not really implying a “they’re watching you narrative” - who’s “they” and if it’s global syndicate why did they do something as innocuous as putting it on Facebook? But yes, the real story is that training data (and “re…

it's great that you personally are thorough enough to dig into the article and see for yourself - my favorite data set size of 1 and conclusions from that - but half the people even here, let alone outside of hn, will just grab the headline and run with it, saying "I heard roombas spy on people", and that's a problem. And the people who wrote this article know this full well.

Re: How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

#30

Post by kelnos »

louison11 wrote: post #9

Clickbait. There is no news here. No privacy was infringed. This was a private dev version.

Pretty sure none of the users consented to photos of them on the toilet being posted on Facebook (and now a news article; wtf was the Tech Review thinking).
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