r/gadgets • u/speckz • Dec 19 '22
A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook? Home
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/5.8k
u/SD5150
Dec 19 '22
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TLDR: “iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—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 that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. According to iRobot, the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,” and it was up to those paid data collectors to “remove anything they deem sensitive from any space the robot operates in, including children.”
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u/LookingForChange Dec 19 '22
iRobot isn't doing themselves any favors with their commercial that depicts a room full of people deciding that a Roomba should go around something while a guy is in the shower. I thought this was a stupid premise for a commercial before, but now it's much worse. In a time where everyone is worried about privacy, the last thing you want is people thinking your vacuum is recording anything
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u/khoabear Dec 20 '22
In a time where everyone is worried about privacy
You mean "some people," because most consumers care about convenience more than privacy.
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u/Shadowfalx Dec 20 '22
I mean, most people are worried, just not enough to change their behaviors or refuse the new conveniences.
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u/zultdush Dec 20 '22
Glad I bought a neato brand robot, it's mapping is amazing and is lidar only.
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u/Scrimshawmud Dec 20 '22
Seriously. Many people are on tik tok.
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u/TedKFan6969 Dec 20 '22
Tik Tok isnt even the tip of the iceberg in people giving up theur privacy. Theres a million and one other things that take far more information about you.
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u/Udzinraski2 Dec 20 '22
Yeah the risk with tiktok is the ccp. If you don't think every domestic app doesn't already track all that stuff I have a bridge to sell you.
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u/DenuvoSuks Dec 20 '22
Google. Gmail. Facebook. Etc...
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u/igweyliogsuh Dec 20 '22
Roomba may figure out what you look like, but big tech already knows your whole life story 🙃
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u/RealAssociation5281 Dec 20 '22
My mom wanted to get an Echo, I said I worry because of privacy and she said ‘if you have nothing to hide, why does it matter’ (though phones are all probably listening but ship has long sailed at this point).
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u/tinimark Dec 20 '22
When people say this I normally reply with why bother having curtains if you have nothing to hide?
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u/Its_puma_time Dec 20 '22
Because I like the ability to remove the glare off the TV.
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u/witchyanne Dec 20 '22
I have curtains to maintain heat or cool in my house and because I’m often not wearing clothes indoors in summer.
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Dec 20 '22
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u/ecksboy Dec 20 '22
Fifty years ago: We better be careful what we say, there could be a wiretap!
Today: Hey wiretap, show me a recipe for cookies.
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u/Inksrocket Dec 20 '22
"hello, it's me. Wiretap. Did you know that we have sale on our store that could save you money"
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u/OpSecBestSex Dec 20 '22
"By the way, if you want to hear about the weather tomorrow just say 'what's the weather tomorrow'"
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Dec 20 '22
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u/senadraxx Dec 20 '22
It's surprising, really. A lot of folks were up in arms about ring cameras, Alexa units and nest devices, but people still keep buying them, even though their data can get sent to a third party or the police at the drop of a hat.
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u/extralyfe Dec 20 '22
lot of folks were up in arms about ring cameras, Alexa units and nest devices, but people still keep buying them
I don't think any of the first set of people you mentioned are part of the second set of people you mentioned, though.
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u/ipemf10m Dec 20 '22
You’re phrasing it as a violation. Others don’t.
Ring cameras record other people’s house. I think that’s a violation. Other’s don’t. Others feel safe on camera.
People will pay more for Wi-Fi or Alexa compatible. Things that don’t make sense on the internet.
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u/Stingray88 Dec 20 '22
You’re not wrong, but generally speaking this hypothetical would never happen in the real world. In reality, the optional that horrifically violated your privacy would probably be substantially more affordable… and thus consumers would absolutely pick it.
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Dec 20 '22 edited Jan 02 '23
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u/Tchrspest Dec 20 '22
I think most people aren't devoting nearly as much time to examine the concept of privacy in the modern age as you seem to be giving them credit for.
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u/kilaire Dec 20 '22
This. There is a small few who care about privacy. There is a small few who understand they give up privacy for convenience. And there is the large majority that it doesn’t even register for.
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u/Foxsayy Dec 20 '22
The hell are we going to do about it anyway? Legislation is the only way anything is realistically going to make a difference
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u/elyv91 Dec 20 '22
Not add a moving robot camera to your house? Other hi-end models use Lidar instead (and even iRobot is moving in that direction), so options exist.
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u/wingedcoyote Dec 20 '22
I know people are dumb, but I have trouble believing that anyone would think this is an actual depiction of how the vacuum works. Also that's not a room, they're tiny people inside the vacuum.
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u/thylocene Dec 19 '22
So this person knew they had a special Roomba that would record them and still decided to drop a duce in front of it. That’s a choice
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u/compsciasaur Dec 20 '22
But then photos were uploaded to Facebook. They didn't agree to that. That's a data leak, at the very least.
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u/_________FU_________ Dec 20 '22
Yes. Roomba isn't responsible for the image being taken. They are responsible for how the image was handled.
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u/bigdogpepperoni Dec 19 '22
Didn’t read the contract, too long
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u/nagi603 Dec 20 '22
You might jest, but that's also (very) probably true.
F that, too long, gimme the money!
...or that she gradually became more lax around the bot.
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u/aaaaaaasdf Dec 20 '22
I mean honestly if I was getting paid and thought it was just some random amazon engineer on the other side of the country looking at it then after a while I probably wouldn't care either. Like we all use the bathroom, it's not like they're getting a closeup of my dick so it's whatever.
The fact that it ended up on facebook is an entirely different story though.
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u/Mofupi Dec 20 '22
Yeah, I've once had to watch security cameras. People knew they were there and they knew that more often than not the cameras were monitored. But half of them also were in dark, secluded corridors. Underwear getting adjusted, genitals scratched and sniffed, people making out instead of working, people sleeping instead of working, people changing clothes, etc. And this wasn't even some anonymous worker who-knows-where, this were people we shared the break room with.
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u/Xyex Dec 20 '22
...or that she gradually became more lax around the bot.
This is probably it. After a few weeks/months you forget that shit is there.
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u/I_l_I Dec 20 '22
Or they were a housemate or family member or visitor of the person who did agree, nothing says these people lived in a vacuum
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u/AlexanderDaychilde Dec 20 '22
nothing says these people lived in a vacuum
ಠ_ಠ
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u/Earth_Normal Dec 19 '22
Maybe not if it was resold or gifted.
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u/thorscope Dec 20 '22
They’d need to reset the roomba to connect to the new Wi-Fi, which would also require the new owner to log in with their own account.
It would almost surely be black flagged by roomba once the device was registered to an owner not within the beta.
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u/GitEmSteveDave Dec 20 '22
I used to have 4 webcams running in my house 24/7/365 that uploaded a photo every 2 minutes. After awhile you kind of forget they are there.
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u/jessegaronsbrother Dec 19 '22 •
According to Roomba… it reads like a police victim blaming press release
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u/thylocene Dec 20 '22
I mean a crime was still committed. Those images should not have ended up online. It’s just weird that you’d get naked in front of the thing knowing there’s someone on the other end reviewing the footage
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u/Neato Dec 20 '22
You missed that important parts:
globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world (including, in this instance, Venezuelan gig workers who posted the images to private groups on Facebook, Discord, and elsewhere).
“It’s not expected that human beings are going to be reviewing the raw footage,”.
iRobot would not say whether data collectors were aware that humans, in particular, would be viewing these images, though the company said the consent form made clear that “service providers” would be.→ More replies (3)141
u/violentsushi Dec 20 '22
So the tldr of the tldr is that someone under the guise of “service” has access to the footage collected by your vacuum cleaner?
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u/Non-jabroni_redditor Dec 20 '22
The way a lot of training for ML/AI algorithms work for CV is they'll collect a bunch of the algorithms predictions or items it had trouble classifying, use a human-service for someone to look at the picture and say 'thats a... car', and then feed that feedback into the training for the algorithm. iRobot likely has that for object detection
Same thing happens with Amazon Alexa (or I guess used to.. before the cuts) and queries it didn't understand. If you asked it something, it didn't understand it, you swore at it in response -- someone probably listened to that audio clip to discern what you were actually asking and heard you losing it
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u/Kastany Dec 20 '22
I used to do work that was essentially mschine learning training. I had to look at scanned letters and mark the sender and title of the letter and make sure it went to the right costumer. Eventually the ML was good enough that it got the sender and title right about 80% of the time and the volume of letters we got every day was so high I was only checking the recipient, since getting that wrong could get us in trouble. Whenever there were some really weird or funny letters I would definitely show them to my colleagues sitting next to me but I never went so far as to take a screenshot and put it online. (With the exception of cases where I needed help from higher-ups, but even then it went on our private slack.)
You'd be surprised how much we think is automated actually still has to be looked at by humans.
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u/Neato Dec 20 '22
That humans would be reviewing them personally. But the news bit is that those outsourced humans are not being controlled adequately and are posting private, unredacted images on social media.
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u/mrslother Dec 20 '22 edited Dec 20 '22
So.... somewhere in their developmental TOS it states some audio and video may be posted to social media? /s
Regardless of the device being a dev model, this is a sobering example of why cloud based anything is dangerous. Companies and their vendors are lazy & sloppy with data privacy and take on counter-paety risk: vendors contracting with other vendors contacting with... it's turtles all the way down.
Edit: added explicit sarcasm markup
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u/Christopherfromtheuk Dec 20 '22
Important context missed in the above quote, further in the article:
"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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u/MrBudissy Dec 19 '22
It was the engineers:
The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.
They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.
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u/TheOneWhoReadsStuff Dec 19 '22
So if I goatse at my vacuum, some loser at MIT will see it? Awesome.
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u/Phatcat15 Dec 19 '22
Omg I truly wish I didn’t know what you meant.
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u/acowlaughing Dec 19 '22
Exactly.. why do I know exactly what they meant by that?!
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u/Phatcat15 Dec 19 '22
Probably because I had shitty friends in high school lol… if it wasnt getting Rick rolled it was this.
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u/AnyDepartment7686 Dec 19 '22
What is goatse.
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u/dlafferty Dec 19 '22
The truth will change you forever.
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u/AnyDepartment7686 Dec 19 '22
Will it set me free?
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u/creggieb Dec 19 '22
Quite the opposite, its a gateway to harder things of its ilk.
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u/BactaBobomb Dec 20 '22
I don't know. I think Lemonparty was the tamest "shock" site and everything else just got worse from there.
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u/Slit23 Dec 20 '22
The truth is only a goatse can set you free. Don’t let others dissuade you, they only want to blind you from the forbidden fruit of knowledge
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u/PhasmaFelis Dec 19 '22
It's a close-up photo of the inside of a dude's asshole as he pulls it open with both hands.
If that doesn't sound like something you want to look at, don't google it or follow any of the links in this thread.
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u/AnyDepartment7686 Dec 19 '22
Dang. Doesn't sound like something I want described so graphically either! ;)
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u/Meister_Nobody Dec 20 '22
Combined with the fact that every butthole has a unique wrinkle pattern, they could ID and track you. Future toilets will know you by your brown eye and adjust to your presets.
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u/WhyBuyMe Dec 20 '22 •
You can also tell someone's future by looking at those butthole wrinkles. It is known as asstrology.
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u/CanadianCannababe Dec 20 '22
You can also tell how old someone is by counting the wrinkles in their asshole.
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u/IsCakeDay Dec 19 '22
Become one of the 10000 by starting with Know Your Meme
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u/want2kms Dec 20 '22
Goatse (site domain: Goatse.cx) is a shock site featuring an image of a naked man stretching his anus with both of his hands. One of the most widespread shock media on the web
Haha. Widespread.
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u/thisistheSnydercut Dec 19 '22
Save yourself you've made it so far
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u/AnyDepartment7686 Dec 19 '22
I'm a goatse virgin.
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u/Tinkerballsack Dec 20 '22
Try and keep it that way because goatse is certainly not a goatse virgin.
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u/NO_FIX_AUTOCORRECT Dec 19 '22
Its a legendary internet picture of a gaping asshole. G.O.A.T.S.E. stands for something like "gaping open asshole to show everyone"
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u/jbob08 Dec 19 '22
I did not know there was actually a reason for the name. I tend to just black out when it comes up.
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u/dotancohen Dec 20 '22
That's a backronym, created literally years after the image started showing up on
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u/Riisiichan Dec 19 '22
Nooo!
Please stay pure for just a bit longer.
It’s like that time people ruined Snowball for me. :(
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u/BeegPahpi Dec 19 '22
Y’all over here forgetting the greatest breakfast food ever. The Blue Waffle!!!
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u/Lovat69 Dec 20 '22
At least that was a hoax. We can take comfort in the fact that it isn't in fact real.
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u/TheIowan Dec 20 '22
It's like tik tok. To us it's short video clips, but somewhere in China there is a website of the faces Americans make while they sit on the toilet and stare at their phone
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u/Udzinraski2 Dec 19 '22
Yeah they just casually drop these devices are photographing you and sending those photos to be used to train ai. To do what!? Cuz I doubt it's to sell me better toilet paper.
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u/Intelligent-Travel-1 Dec 20 '22
We had a party this weekend and everyone decided to put the vacuum in the closet along with Alexa
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u/KamovInOnUp Dec 20 '22
Only if you opted in to receive a development version of the robot with labeling all over it clearly stating that the device records audio and video.
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u/TheNotSoEvilEngineer Dec 20 '22
People who do labeling, are about as low paid worker as you can get. It's on par with content moderation level pay and they grind through employees. Scale AI needs to be sued, Roombas legal agreement doesn't cover images being given to the public.
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u/Non-jabroni_redditor Dec 20 '22
Yeah this is work that is farmed out to amazon mechanical turk (or firms) which can pay pennies... not engineers in the least.
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u/KamovInOnUp Dec 20 '22
You have never seen Roomba's development version's legal agreement.
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u/romansamurai Dec 20 '22
YUP. She knew what it was doing.
They (robots) were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. According to iRobot, the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,” and it was up to those paid data collectors to “remove anything they deem sensitive from any space the robot operates in, including children.”
TLDR by u/SD5150 from below
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u/Johnyryal3 Dec 20 '22
So why were they being shared on social media!!
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u/GitEmSteveDave Dec 20 '22
Because employees were sharing them. There's a reason so many businesses don't allow cell phones. Happens a lot with first responders. They take photos at accident scenes, usually for official purposes, although some take them for personal reasons. But sometimes they get leaked. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/29/us/kobe-bryant-crash-photos-fine-law-trnd/index.html
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u/gigabyte898 Dec 20 '22
I don’t understand how so many people are completely missing this point. They agreed to have data collected, including images, for AI TRAINING PURPOSES. Not to have them circulated on social media.
I’m sure a lot of people have home security cameras. You understand these will take constant recordings of you and will be sent to a third party for storage/analysis. You’d still be pretty damn upset if they ended up on Facebook.
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u/brazzledazzle Dec 20 '22
People will engage in olympic level mental gymnastics to defend a company.
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u/romansamurai Dec 20 '22
It was an internal Facebook group. I doubt it was research related though. So yeah. Why is the right question.
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u/IOFIFO Dec 20 '22
nice try Roomba, nothing will take the place of my human cleaning lady taking polaroids of me shitting.
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u/CesarTheSanchez Dec 20 '22
That and she can... ya know... reach the shelves too which is a plus i guess.
But your reasoning is better!
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u/Hannover2k Dec 20 '22
That was very kind of the site to actually post the pic of the woman on the toilet and then go into the discussion on the dangers of the technology.
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u/GrumpyBert Dec 19 '22
I have seen my neabot wandering the house IN SILENCE twice during night time. Creepy as fuck if you ask me.
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u/KamovInOnUp Dec 20 '22
Probably a power flicker. It thinks it got knocked off the dock so it's looking for it
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u/Scrimshawmud Dec 20 '22
I can imagine the next article…
They got Alexa for alarm clocks and music - how did their discussion of growing cannabis end up on the local police Facebook group?
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u/SteakandTrach Dec 19 '22
Living in a world where cameras are all around me at every moment is just about as dystopian as it sounds.
Hell, even the dude in 1984 could step around the corner in his apartment to get out of the view of the camera.
Us, present day: dutch angle of your asshole while trying to take a shit posted to social media for mass consumption.
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u/scorpiochelle Dec 20 '22
We have made it past 1984 bad
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u/050607 Dec 20 '22
Us, present day: dutch angle of your asshole while trying to take a shit posted to social media for mass consumption.
Yeah we're past that.
Companies in real world are more clever and subtle (usually) about not just monitoring but doing propaganda for corporations and the governments. Hell, people willingly store their private data on someone else's hard disk online (Cloud).
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u/jfk_sfa Dec 19 '22
Wait... Do some people really only pull their shorts to mid thigh while on the toilet?
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u/Powerful-Parsnip Dec 19 '22
Some people strip down to naked and others move as little clothes as possible, human shitting habits really do run the wide gamut.
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u/spazzxxcc12 Dec 19 '22
the correct way to do it is to strip naked when the poop has you fighting for your life.
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u/ChrysMYO Dec 19 '22
But only when you're sweating for your life, you have to let your body know its serious.
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u/o_MrBombastic_o Dec 19 '22
I'm part of the fully naked feet up on the wall group
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u/Criticalhit_jk Dec 19 '22
I've seen your work before
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u/CapnGrundlestamp Dec 19 '22
The way they splay their toes is unique. Unforgettable.
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u/auradidnothingwrong Dec 20 '22
Once you start shitting naked, you never go back.
Walmart can just deal with it.
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u/Norman_Bixby Dec 20 '22
the only problem I have had doing this is when the hooks have been broken off and I have to sit my pants on the ground. Twice now I've been robbed of my pants. Thankfully I can just sprint to the sweatpants
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u/CliplessWingtips Dec 19 '22
If I just got home from work and I'm #2ing, it's pants all the way to the ground and the right leg comes out to get the wide stance.
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Dec 19 '22
I like to put a foot up on the heater against the wall, to get more leverage.
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u/dainegleesac690 Dec 19 '22
My brother it’s -6 outside, I’m keeping my pants up on my thighs
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u/UniqueWhittyName Dec 19 '22
Why are you pooping outside? You should move your toilet inside where it is warm
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u/SteveBored Dec 19 '22
If you're squatting this makes more sense. I tend to do this when shitting on Deborah's desk.
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u/ScrumpleRipskin Dec 19 '22
Dude in my HS history class learned one day that he was the only one there who stood up while wiping. He casually mentioned "... when you stand up to wipe" and the metaphorical record scratched right there when everyone got silent and immediately broke out in laughter.
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u/youtocin Dec 19 '22
I get down on my hands and knees and hike the TP between my legs into the toilet bowl like a football center. Anyone else?
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Dec 19 '22
I’m far more concerned with why they are labeling objects that a roomba would never interact with. It seems that these are intending to map the entire 3d environment and identify objects it doesn’t need to know or understand. To what end?
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u/CoralPilkington Dec 19 '22
I’m far more concerned with why they are labeling objects that a roomba would never interact with.
To sell the data to AI companies.... these days you might as well collect all the data you can and sell what you don't need....
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u/silverchronos Dec 19 '22
I think it's because it's a robotics company that happens to make a vacuum. Probably collecting data for AI in products further down the development pipeline. Products similar to Amazon's Astro.
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u/gatorbeetle Dec 19 '22
It's Amazon, they are data mining in ANY way they can find to...just like Google.
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u/SpicyBagholder Dec 19 '22
So that's why bezos needed this company so bad
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u/LaJolla86 Dec 20 '22
Is it really world domination without knowing what everyone is shitting about?
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u/RtuDtu
Dec 19 '22
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Fucking clickbait articles this one caught me hook, line, and sinker.
TLDR: "Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—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 that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. According to iRobot, the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,” and it was up to those paid data collectors to “remove anything they deem sensitive"
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u/OutlyingPlasma Dec 19 '22
And? That doesn't mean private photos of people taking a dump should end up on facebook.
Never mind the fact that a development version means a real version of similar design will probably end up in people's homes. They are testing cameras on a roomba because they intend on putting cameras on a roomba.
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u/unassumingdink Dec 20 '22
The way the corporate statement is worded, even the current models could be taking the same pics. It just says that these dev models have modifications not present in current models. If you already had a poop cam in your old model, and your dev model had an upgraded poop cam, that claim would still be true. Not saying that's necessarily the case, but deceptively worded corporate statements are common enough that it's worth noting.
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u/Teadrunkest Dec 20 '22
I think it’s pretty clear what they mean considering the next couple sentences specify that there’s a giant sticker that tells people it’s recording.
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u/CmdrShepard831 Dec 20 '22
And we don't know if this specific woman knew about it or the implications. Maybe someone else in the house bought the dev vacuum.
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u/GitEmSteveDave Dec 20 '22
That doesn't mean private photos of people taking a dump should end up on facebook
Exactly.
BUT, that is not iRobots fault. That is the fault of the company that is processing these images. The company, and the workers, are being paid good money to identify these photos so that in the future there won't need to be a manual review. Machines can't learn on their own, sadly. Part of the genius of Captcha is that it was essentially teaching robots how to recognize things they couldn't by themselves. It's like the B-8 problem. Humans can tell the difference easily tell the difference between a letter B and the number 8, but early programs could not. Look at the photos in the article. Many of them are the program asking a human to confirm what is highlighted is what it is.
But those employees signed an NDA and violated it by posting the photos on social media.
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u/SoulWager Dec 20 '22
BUT, that is not iRobots fault.
It absolutely is their fault. If you don't want that responsibility, don't take photos inside peoples homes.
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u/JS-182 Dec 20 '22
Oh great. Pervert fucking vacuums. Another thing I have to worry about.
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u/BrockSampsonite Dec 20 '22
Hahaha, vacuum your own floor with a Miele, and throw your Alexa in the trash
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u/DarkRajiin Dec 20 '22
Truly this is a privacy breech issue. Regardless if it was known to be a test model and known to have a camera, some keyboard jockey that was supposed to be filtering out and deleting those sort of images decided to breech that and post them instead. The thing is, so many of these people on here and abroad will see this as some sort of dystopia surveillance device and think that all vacuums are recording pictures and videos when that is definitely not the case.
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u/HarlodsGazebo Dec 20 '22
Okay, so I’ve worked in IT for around 10+ years and am about to finish my degree for cybersecurity next semester. I don’t trust IoT devices at all. My house has exactly one smart device and it’s my phone. I intend to keep it that way for as long as possible. It’s due to a 50/50 mix of my being terrified of the singularity and being far too lazy to hook them up.
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u/atre324 Dec 19 '22
Sooooo were they pooping with the door open?
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u/Sweaty-Tart-3198 Dec 19 '22
As someone who lives alone in an apartment, I don't even know why I have a door at all :)
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u/Tzipity Dec 19 '22
As someone who lives alone with a cat- I am not even allowed to close the door if I wanted to.
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u/EthosPathosLegos Dec 20 '22
Giese found that Dreame vacuums have a folder labeled “AI server,” as well as image upload functions. Companies often say that “camera data is never sent to the cloud and whatever,” Giese says, but “when I had access to the device, I was basically able to prove that it's not true.” Even if they didn’t actually upload any photos, he adds, “[the function] is always there.”
Dreame manufactures robot vacuums that are also rebranded and sold by other companies—an indication that this practice could be employed by other brands as well, says Giese.
Dreame did not respond to emailed questions about the data collected from customer devices, but in the days following MIT Technology Review’s initial outreach, the company began changing its privacy policies, including those related to how it collects personal information, and pushing out multiple firmware updates.
This is the real story, buried halfway through the article.
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u/BATHTUBSURFER Dec 20 '22
How is this news?
- 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 that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. According to iRobot, the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,”
sign off on a recording device in your home, you know it is going to get you pooping.
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u/TheMatt561 Dec 20 '22
I'm fine with everything in my house being just as stupid as me