61–70 of 148 posts
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?
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Is iOS like Android where Bluetooth permissions are a part of the location info permissions?
No. Out of spite I took the iPad to a friend's house, enabled location, clicked through the welcome screen and disabled it again. Then came back home and hooked up the device. So, no, it's not linked to its BT needs at all.
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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 in…
If you read the article you'll also find the owners were specifically aware that these units are special in that they upload all data - commercial devices do not share any images or video without the users consent [0]. It's also absurd to think they didn't face safeguards. We can only speculate if the individual was fired, or if stronger policies were put in place since 2020, but it's naive to expect that whatever po…
Well, you'll find a Roomba spokesperson saying that, anyway.
I don't mean to imply that the spokesperson was lying and these were plain old roomba's instead of special R&D Roomba's.
I do mean to imply that I think a roomba spokesperson would describe "included in paragraph 12 of a 23 paragraph terms of service that they clicked through" as "specifically aware", but I would not consider that any kind of "proof" that the people actually were "specifically aware". At best it is an argument they ought to have been, which is a different thing (and it's an argument).
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That’s really annoying but can’t you use use the “while using the app” permission? Or do they insist on “Always”. And I am not sure I buy the “anyone who does one bad thing will necessarily do all of the bad things” view.
Why would I want them to know where I live? It's just a thing that sucks dirt of my floor. And that's without getting into why it must have an Internet connection (to enable a large chunk of its functionality). It has a Bluetooth, it is perfectly capable of talking to the smartphone using it, but it can't be controlled that way. Re: bad thing - not a "bad thing" per se, just a very cavalier attitude, which is as trou…
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…
Here's a funny bit. Roomba iOS app refuses to go past its welcome screen unless its granted access to the location info. This is unreasonable, they don't need this info for their app to function. However their devices are all but unusable without an app, so they ultimately blackmail people into giving location data to them. Meaning they don't really give a sh#t about users' privacy, so it's not that "they are watchin…
I've returned several "smart" devices that required an app and an account. One example is GoVee smart blubs. As soon as they refused to work without an account I sent them back. Another is some Meross smart outlets. I retuned them for Eve Energy outlets.
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 degr…
> A contractor posts some of these photos to a private Facebook group used by other contractors on the project. That's where it went wrong. Everything else seems reasonable for a visual AI training project, well signalled to the participating users and the data securely communicated. Thereafter, the data was mismanaged. There is clearly no such things as a "private" Facebook group. So called "contractors" [1] using a…
And this is the problem with most of the technology spying on us. Once the data is in someone else's hands, there is nothing you can do to prevent it from being "mismanaged". It can exist forever and you aren't allowed to know who has it or what they're doing with it.
Bugging your own home with any device designed to spy on you is just a terrible idea and I'm amazed at how many people are oblivious to the harm they risk bringing on themselves and everyone else around them.
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 degr…
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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.
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.
Their policy ( https://homesupport.irobot.com/s/article/964 ) seems pretty clear, and from what I've seen of the app it explicitly asks before uploading photos. If you're concerned you can turn the recognition feature off, or block it from the Internet and trigger it manually.
> The remaining training data comes from what iRobot calls “staged data collection,” in which the company builds models that it then records.
> iRobot has also begun offering regular consumers the opportunity to opt in to contributing training data through its app, where people can choose to send specific images of obstacles to company servers to improve its algorithms. iRobot says that if a customer participates in this “user-in-the-loop” training, as it is known, the company receives only these specific images, and no others. Baussmann, the company representative, said in an email that such images have not yet been used to train any algorithms.
https://nypost.com/2017/07/25/roomba-maker-wants-to-sell-you...
Considering that this is how poorly they protect the sensitive data their devices collect (even those used for development purposes) I guess it's a good thing that public backlash over their spying plans forced them to reconsider.