The automated vacuum cleaners from the Roomba brand help us keep our homes cleaner, its programming system makes cleaning more efficient because it internally stores a kind of map of our house to move around it more effectively.
These 'blueprints' that contain information about the layout of our home's floor, should only serve that purpose, but according to Reuters that data could be part of future revenues for Roomba, which it could sell to the highest bidder in the near future.
In the terms of service of the company iRobot that manufactures these vacuum cleaners, specify that “Some of our robots are equipped with smart technology that allows the robots to transmit data wirelessly to the service”.
That information, say the people responsible at iRobot, is used to collect usage data and statistics, diagnose and fix problems and improve device behavior. That collected data includes “battery life and health, number of missions, device identifier and location mapping”.
It is this last piece of data that precisely affects the future of our devices, which clean our floors but at the same time create location data that can be used to create those detailed maps.
Fountain: xataka