101–110 of 148 posts
Valetudo [0] supports local only operation of various supported robot vacuums. Even apart from the privacy stuff, the fast local web interface and open standards integration support (mqtt, homeassistant etc) are brilliant. 0: http://valetudo.cloud/
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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.
How did you connect your device to your wireless network?
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And, so, did you do the right thing and return it or did you just accept and therefore effectively indicate to Roomba by your actions that you're ok with it? 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.
> And, so, did you do the right thing and return it or did you just accept and therefore effectively indicate to Roomba by your actions that you're ok with it? The burden is on them to not perform those actions, not on me. I should be fully entitled to make use of the product without agreeing to any additional contracts or permissions.
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I don't have a Roomba (or have used their app) but when something annoyingly insists on my location to setup/install, I just hit "Allow Once" with "Precise: Off" just to get past that screen. Then you can turn off the Location Services to "Never" for that app in Settings straight after. Not perfect but good enough?
This can be fixed by an app update as they may check each time you open the app whether they have the required permissions or not.
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 the following para:-
"In other words, by iRobot’s estimation, anyone whose photos or video appeared in the streams had agreed to let their Roombas monitor them. iRobot declined to let MIT Technology Review view the consent agreements and did not make any of its paid collectors or employees available to discuss their understanding of the terms."
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There was a huge backlash to this. There was the potential for thieves to find out the layout of someone’s home and when it was unoccupied. Add cameras to that and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
>There was the potential for thieves to find out the layout of someone’s home and when it was unoccupied. Add cameras to that and you have a disaster waiting to happen. This feels like pearl clutching for no reason. It's not hard to find out the layout of a house. In a given neighborhood there are probably dozens of houses for sale, which would have their floor plans publicly available as part of their listing. At th…
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And, so, did you do the right thing and return it or did you just accept and therefore effectively indicate to Roomba by your actions that you're ok with it? 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.
> And, so, did you do the right thing and return it or did you just accept and therefore effectively indicate to Roomba by your actions that you're ok with it? The burden is on them to not perform those actions, not on me. I should be fully entitled to make use of the product without agreeing to any additional contracts or permissions.
The roombas in the article were testing units, and people here seem to think this is just available for dev hardware. However it has been available as part of the iRobot beta program for a long time: https://www.reddit.com/r/roomba/comments/qrs5e5/roomba_beta_... and, of course, iRobot is in the middle of being acquired by Amazon, who have a long history of giving police, access to customers' camera feeds without pro…
Roomba's claim is that only users enrolled in/with special units were part of the data being stored & labeled by contractors. The sort of live-view functionality described in that post doesn't necessarily require Roomba to store/transmit video/mean it was part of the set of images leaked by ScaleAI contractors.
So can people with credentials of compromised iRobot accounts.
So can Amazon, post acquisition.
People that purchased these devices weren't signing up for a system with such terrible privacy implications.
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.
As a bonus, they seem to be far ahead of iRobot at vacuuming/mopping.
It's not a great option, but might be the best if you are looking for something that will map out a house and clean designated rooms, and that will function when not connected to the internet.