Roomba maker may share maps of users' homes with Google, Amazon or Apple
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... 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 – Amazon, Apple and Google’s Alphabet – in the next couple of years. None of the three commented on this story.
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Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, concurred, saying: “This is a particularly creepy example of how our privacy can be undermined by companies that want to profit from the information that smart devices can generate about our homes and lives.
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“Maybe that doesn’t unnerve you, but it probably should,” says Rhett Jones of technology site Gizmodo. “This is all part of the larger quest for a few major companies to hoover up every bit of data about you that they can. Now, they want to know all about your living space."
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This report makes me very happy that I paid more for a non-wifi, non-Alexa-connected robot vacuum than for the wifi version a few months back (my brand--Neato--wasn't mentioned in the article, but it has mapping technology). Sometimes the trade-off of privacy for convenience is worth it, but here the benefit seems to be to heavily weighted to the data collectors, not to the consumers.