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How did Roomba-recorded photos end up on Facebook?

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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, I’m not sure I buy their explanation about special development roombas since they offered zero proof. It is simple for any person with even basic knowledge of networking to independently come to the conclusion that Roombas are not uploading video streams (or photographs) to the internet. I know the IP (10.0.0.11) and MAC (50:14:79:1E:AB:6B) address of my Roomba and using the Insight Netflow Analyzer for OPNsen…

You really think Roomba owners know how to do any of that, or even would?

Yes.

A non-trivial number of them. Thousands, out of millions, at least.

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

#92
post #26

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/

Highly encourage folks to take a look at Valetudo. I recently installed it on a Dreame Z10 Pro and it works well. Even without various integrations, I added a DNS record for it and can happily go to http://vacuum/ to control it locally.

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

#93
post #87

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.

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

#94
post #25

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…

Private Facebook group, free tier Slack, a Zoom meeting, free Google Drive. I fail to see the difference.

All of these are reputable, popular SaaS applications, widely used to collaborate at work. All of these are equally trustworthy (read: not that much), and give you the same privacy guarantees. Using either in a company setting without a contract in hand is unwise, IMO, but that ship has sailed long ago.

GP is correct. #2 is bad, but not significant. #3 is the bigger violation here.

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

#95
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Face blurred, no way to see who it is (though I haven't checked for EXIF in the picture, that would be fubar). IMHO and I don't expect anyone else to share it, the picture drives the surveillance aspect home better than word would, though perhaps that makes more of a difference for people who don't ordinarily read Tech Review.

>...and I don't expect anyone else to share it,

...aha!

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

#96
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Roomba iOS app refuses to go past its welcome screen unless its granted access to the location info. Does anyone know, is this like Android where some bluetooth functionality is behind the location permission?

You need location to scan for Bluetooth in app, because scanning for Bluetooth was how advertisers got your location. You don’t need this to interact with a Bluetooth device, the user can connect to it from the settings.

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

#97

Roomba is the company that planned on using their vacuum cleaners to map people's houses so they could sell that data to third parties. 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 r…

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 the same time, there is a high chance that multiple homes in a given neighborhood share a floor plan. Therefore the layout of any given house isn't exactly some sort of a secret.

As for figuring out whether a house is occupied, there are far easier ways. Any internet connected laptop/phone has built-in cameras and microphones, which also allow you do determine occupancy.

Of course, none of this matters. The typical robber isn't going to do some ocean's 11 heist shit where they're scoping out your house's layout in advance and hacking into megacorp's servers so they can learn your daily routine. They're far more likely to make an educated guess based on whether your car is parked and whether the lights are on. If they're really prepared they'll maybe drive through your neighborhood several times a day to get a better sense of occupancy.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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…

As well as the spokesperson from Scale. The evidence provided to the author also strongly cooborates this fact. Seeing reviews of their commercial devices, they're pretty clear about what is and is not uploaded, with nothing visual uploaded be default. Therefore I don't agree with your implication as I just don't see any evidence to support it. Even the article's author, with the evidence they were given doesn't push…

I don't understand what you're suggesting or pointing me to about what evidence there is about what the people who had these Roomba's knew.

You are making claims about what the owners "specifically knew". What is the evidence about what the roomba owners (or, uh, holders) did or did not know, "specifically" or otherwise?

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

#99
Is there any verification that there actually was consent? E.g. has anyone come forward with evidence that there really were devices which did this?

Even then, who made the consent? Did they verify the person who did legally had the ability to do so? What happens if the person on the toilet is a child?

I hate lawyers and I’m not one myself but even I can tell you this is a bad fucking idea.

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

#100
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roomba iOS app refuses to go past its welcome screen unless its granted access to the location info. Does anyone know, is this like Android where some bluetooth functionality is behind the location permission?

You need location to scan for Bluetooth in app, because scanning for Bluetooth was how advertisers got your location. You don’t need this to interact with a Bluetooth device, the user can connect to it from the settings.

And if it's a Bluetooth Low Energy device that doesn't use connections?
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