Roomba wants to sell the maps of the inside of your home it created while cleaning

Cory Doctorow 8:37 am Wed Jul 26, 2017

Your Roomba vacuum cleaner collects data about the size and geometry of your home as it cleans and transmits that data back to Irobot, Roomba's parent company — and now the company says it wants to sell that data to companies like Apple and Google.

What's more, Roomba's shitty terms of service let it do just about anything it wants with the data it gathers.

"There's an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared," said Angle. That vision has its fans, from investors to the likes of Amazon, Apple and Alphabet, who are all pushing artificially intelligent voice assistants as smart home interfaces… Angle told Reuters that iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to sell its maps to one or more of the Big Three in the next couple of years.

Roomba vacuum maker iRobot betting big on the 'smart' home
[Jan Wolfe/Reuters]

Your Robot Vacuum Cleaner Will Soon Collect And Sell Data About You And Your Home
[Karl Bode/Techdirt]

(Image: Irobot)

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