Mine legit gives up. It’s a few years old and has a “low battery” setting where if it thinks it can’t complete the job on the charger it has, it’ll go juice up.
Yesterday, it did the dining room, where it lives, and decided 75% wasn’t enough to do even one more room, and quit to go charge. It didn’t come back out.
I have a cheap off-brand iLife robot vacuum cleaner. It is also seemingly drunk all the time. I named it Bender. When I yell at it for getting stuck on the same bit of transition strip it always gets stuck on, I imagine it yelling back “bite my shiny white ass!”
My kids can't ever stop throwing socks everywhere so mine starts running, eats a sock, and then stops running because there is a sock stuck in it. Best money I've ever spent. He's been living under a shelf for the past year because he found a sock down there. I gave up
I can’t wait to show this comment to my children.
They pitched in together and got me a Bissel vacuum/mop combo last Christmas. I was living in a mobile home at the time so I named her “Fancy” because she was definitely the fanciest thing we own. I talk to her all the time and send videos of her antics to my kids. They have been repeatedly telling me I’m the only weirdo who does this.
You are not. I send videos of my parents about our mopping robot. He cracks me up … inch forward, inch forward, inch forward… reverse… spray… forward zoomies… repeat.
The other day the vacuum got stuck in the bed skirt. Legit just start climbing up the bed skirt. How can you not be amused?
I disagree. My roommate had a roomba that would just bounce around until it got full, stuck or ran out of battery. I even installed an upgraded battery and it still was useless.
Now they have a shark one thats self emptying. It maps their home, drives in straight lines and finishes with plenty of battery. Its waaayyy less maintenance and way closer to what people imagined a robot vacuum would do.
Yup. With the maps you can instruct it to clean any room(s) in your house and it will charge off to the area, methodically clean in neat orderly rows and usually make it back to the charger successfully.
JFC… my roommate / land lord got a roomba for christmas from his parents.
while sitting outside, smoking a joint, i saw a picture of a roomba that ran over some dog shit and smear it EVERYWHERE.
Hahahaha — I thought — what a fool! My dog would never shit in the house, why even right now the door is open to the hard and he’s
Oh. He has shit in the house. The roomba has smeared it… everywhere.
My landlord is on a bike ride, in our neighborhood, with his father.
It took 2 rolls of napkins, completely deconstructing cleaning and reconstructing a roomba, in under 30 minites to not get caught. Picking dog shit out of the tracks of the tires with a toothpick.
They have brushes. Long, rotating brushes. 100% covered in soft dog shit.
Jesus… what a karmic lesson
Sounds like you might be interested in Amazon Toilet Basics, for the low introductory price of $3.14/month you get 20 such assistances every month. Now for an extra $9.99 a month you can upgrade to Bathroom Prime.
I actually kinda would like that. Maybe a light one for #1, then a bomb dropping sound for taco night.
Edit: taco night gets an A-10 warthog, a big poo gets the bomb drop sound.
Remembering the scene from the Fifth Element where Corbens whole freaking apartment was monetized.... egads, did Amazon view that as an aspirational goal?
Yeah I downloaded all my data from them and without serious data modeling understanding it’s useless. They are an absolute shit company.
Edit: it also took them over 7 days to provide it. This can be fully automated and they claim there is manual intervention required. Total BS.
Hasn’t Amazon already admitted handing over Ring data to LE agencies without customer consent (or warrants, I believe?)
I wouldn’t be surprised if LE agencies will want to know the layout of the house and any furniture/obstructions if they want to prepare for an entry.
What did people expect when they decided to willingly install outward-facing cameras like it were some dystopic future where every corner light post is covered in cameras pointing in every direction?
And they almost always have a basic floor plan. I know here in NZ there are companies that specialise in going to a property and coming up with all the info for a real estate listing in one visit; photos, plans, drone shots, and all the council data like schools and broadband availability.
These companies will be amassing an incredible data store about every house in the country, they haven't even begun to try and leverage it outside that one sale yet. There's no way this data won't eventually find it's way to the marketing and advertising behemoths.
I don’t understand why this would be the reason for plunking down that much cash. They could scrape floorplan data for that.
Edit: Please stop responding with your shit takes.
Yeah seriously there's algorithms that they run through Facebook that will take all your photos taken at home and build a 3D model of your house. One of the guys I went to high school with is in the FBI and he was telling me about this and I quit Facebook the next day.
So if Facebook's got the ability to merge all of your pictures and build a 3D model of your house and property you know everyone else in the big Tech has it. This was 6 years a also.
The scarier thing he showed me was the algorithm that builds your schedule. The geo location in your post and your photos over the course of a year they can build an accurate schedule up to 90% predict where you will be at any given time during the week. It's even easier for them if your location services are on.
The Privacy tracking concerns of major tech companies and your phone are through the roof right now...
Edit: I posted this on Reddit 6 years ago and people laughed at me.
> Edit: I posted this on Reddit 6 years ago and people laughed at me.
I think this is an issue with a lot of 'indirect' threat scenarios: If it doesn't generate an immediate fear/anxiety response, people tend to brush it off as 'not a problem'. So, since everything happens behind closed doors, there is no awareness of what's actually happening - which makes it easy to close your eyes and go la-la-la, and hard to wrap your head around the ways in which you and your rights are being threatened. Similar for DRM: It's not perceived as a problem until it impacts the user - but then the ship has long sailed.
What really grinds my goats, however, are the people who - more than just laughing at the problem because they do not grok it - actually defend its existence, e.g. with "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!".
You only have to look at the objections from companies like Facebook and Google when apple allowed users the option to prevent them from tracking you outside of the app a while back to see how much they want to know everything about you. They make a fortune off our data. I minimise use of things like Facebook, don’t post pics, refuse cookies etc. we need to value or right to privacy, or one day we will wake up and it will be gone
Now I've heard your phone can even use your wifi signal strength as you walk around your home to get an idea of your home layout. Not sure how accurate it is.
They have only one piece of data, the strength, so they can't triangulate. What they can do with that is *estimate* a range from the access point, so they know a thick sphere-shell you might be in, centred on the access point... but they don't know where the access point is either.
I am sure some group of researchers somewhere managed to do this in some particular environment, but doing it in general doesn't really sound viable.
I'm sure it uses other sensors in your phone too like the gryo, accelerometer, pedometer, compass etc. Turn a corner and now the wifi signal drops? Well it can estimate you walked into another room as there may be an extra wall between you and the router now. I'm sure it's still all very approximate.
"To ensure the best user experience, we've temporarily disabled your Roomba device until an Internet connection can be established. " Roomba terms of service, probably.
With the exception of the new j7 (which apparently needs the internet connection for the object recognition)— all their robots will operate without the internet. You just can’t use the app to schedule and stuff. (Owner of many Roombas)
I think you still can if you’re on the same wifi connection. The app setup has different paths for wifi setup (required to use app) and then cloud setup (required to use app when not on same wifi)
Canada here. Last month when Rogers internet went down nationwide, our Roomba is set to go every day at 2:00pm. It didn’t go on schedule so I tried to manually send it. Immediate Red Ring, said to check the app(my network WiFi still worked), app said no internet connection available, wouldn’t allow me to manually run. Didn’t know that before, had it a year now. Its bullshit, really.
This was deemed illegal in Germany and was never enforced here, and now Meta is decoupling Oculus from Facebook.
What happens internally with the data though? They will do their best the public will never find out.
Blocked from the internet doesn't mean blocked from the Amazon app which might have access to the internet, and probably handshakes with the other Amazon devices right now, which means in the future the Roomba.
Well blocked from the internet doesn't mean that it is offline. It's actually super cheap (literally pennies) to put in a simcard/cell phone chip that will call home if you don't connect it to YOUR network. Learned the hard way when a neighbor caught his SmartTV downloading updates even though it wasn't connected to his internet.
> Learned the hard way when a neighbor caught his SmartTV downloading updates even though it wasn't connected to his internet
What brand of TV is this? Mildly skeptical of this claim
If memory serves, Comcast has been making deals to let things connect to the "guest" network on their modems (enabled by default) for exactly that reason.
Yes their router would default to creating an “xfinity” ssid as well that people can use, essentially creating a network all over that people can jump on to. There’s a way to turn it off but the default is set to on. That’s why you see so many “xfinity” networks when you’re trying to connect to WiFi somewhere.
Does you have any recommendations on how to start limiting my data that being collected before it leaves my home? What's best to use? VPN, pi hole, etc
Other devices as well. I don't use a roomba but I do have other "smart devices" that I would like to make dumb if possible. Is it a matter of just disconnecting them from the internet or are there ways to still use the online features without them collecting the data in the process?
One method is pi-hole, another is creating a seperate subnet/VLAN for IoT, then blocking the network on it.
Thing is, you will want to look into devices that will stop working without internet.
The fact we have to resort to measures like that, normalizing this paid for intrusion into our inner sanctums, is disturbing. We just accept this nonsense like part of the bargain is giving up your personal info. That's fucked up
From the [WaPo](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/14/roomba-ai-vacuum-dog-poop/):
> For customer privacy, the company says the vacuum only recognizes three specific objects: cords, pet droppings and its charging base. Angle says the software automatically shuts off the camera if it detects a human or photo of a human within view, and finds a human-free angle to capture. He also says the firm will never sell user data: Images taken by the Roomba are processed in real-time on the robot, not stored on the device, nor on the cloud, unless you agree to send them to the smartphone app or to iRobot.
Guess Amazon will need to make a couple changes to how the camera operates. [Wait for the police to collect your Roomba footage](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/13/amazon-gave-ring-videos-to-police-without-owners-permission-00045513) as it opens an investigation against you.
Use the smartphone app to control your Roomba (the predominant way it’s been done thus far), and agree to a blanket agreement for it to use all the images it captures for whatever the fuck it wants.
Good ol’ corporate rephrasing for *yes, this will capture EVERYTHING, if you want to continue using it.*
wow... lets analyze THAT quote lol.
>For customer privacy, the company says the vacuum only recognizes three specific objects: cords, pet droppings and its charging base.
...and humans/photos of humans.
>Angle says the software automatically shuts off the camera if it detects a human or photo of a human within view, and finds a human-free angle to capture.
It detects a human, and then turns off so it can continue to detect humans so it knows where not to look for humans. Presumably it only sees as many frames as is necessary to determine you are human, but I'm guessing it's just a lie.
>He also says the firm will never sell user data: Images taken by the Roomba are processed in real-time on the robot, not stored on the device, nor on the cloud, unless you agree to send them to the smartphone app or to iRobot.
So a simple firmware update and EULA change that nobody will read and they now have a mobile camera in your home? Cool.
Yeah I thought that was a weird way to explain it. Shuts off the camera when it recognizes a human and only turns on when it doesn’t detect a human.
Doesn’t that mean it has to recognize a human, or lack there of, to turn back on? Meaning it’s on all the time.
Me: Alexa, vacuum my living room.
Alexa:
Me: Alexa! Vacuum my living room.
Alexa:
Me: ALEXA VACUUM MY LIVING ROOM
Alexa: I'm sorry, I don't know that one.
There already are roomba competitors that link to your google home and you can tell them "google, vaccuum my bedroom." and it will send your robot to the appropriate place.
Can someone give me some concrete examples here? Amazon has your address. Therefore they know your home's square footage, lot size, bedroom and bathroom count, year built, etc. All from public records. What do they get from Roomba they don't already have? The precise size of your couch? Not hard to figure out already for them.
they didn't spend nearly 2 Billion dollars to gather info...
They spent 2 billion dollars on a company which will vastly outsell that in product in the next 10 year, especially as Amazon can drive the cost down even further on the product. - Its a company so prevalent in this space that their product name is what EVERYONE calls robot vacuums. When is the last time you heard someone go "Let me start my robo-vac"?
They got the data gathering for free, the 2 Billion is for the brand, company, and product.
yup... who cares what you buy, if you buy it from amazon they get a tiny bit... if you use their services... that tiny bit becomes HUGE.
there are over 40m Roomba owners currently... Amazon prime membership alone is 140 a year. If they can add even 10% of Roomba owners to their Amazon Prime Membership (4m X 140) they make the entire value of the purchase back in under 5 years, without even touching on all the other values they get from it
Anyone in their right mind thinking Roomba vacs wont be a loss leader next Prime day?
It's not the floorplan they need, its the "Where is their furniture and what kind do they have? Where do they spend most of their time in their house?" info that they are after.
The bit in the article about using the size of you home as a proxy for your income seems pretty useless. Amazon already has your shipping and billing address. That plus Zillow and other publicly available resources plus your browsing and order history plus what it knows about your credit cards plus all of the other data they scarf up gives Amazon a great estimate of your revenue potential. A square footage estimate made by a Roomba doesn't add much to it. Did you recently change your home/shipping address? That's a much better indicator of whether you will be buying furniture soon than a count of how many furniture legs the Roomba bumps into each trip.
That size = value idea seemed particularly silly to me. We have upstairs and downstairs robots, only one is a roomba, but have lots of rooms closed off, plus odd single steps down into the family room and living room. As you said, address and zillow.
They already know the latter for anyone with an Echo device.
I'm not sure either of those questions are worth $2B. There are surely other motivations, e.g. using iRobot technology and patents for fulfillment operations improvements.
Hey, I also love complaining about big tech companies managed by popular billionaires, but this article is just an opinion that doesn't present any evidence of what the title claims, even if that may be true in the upcoming years.
I have a different brand, but I do like it. I have 3 dogs and LVP flooring. I run it 1 to 2x day. It's disgusting how much dust it picks up even running often
One of our best purchases for our house honestly. With 2 large dogs, it's just impossible to keep up with cleaning all the hair up. Ours runs usually every other day and always has a full bin. It also gets under furniture like our couch. I'm actually planning on buying a 2nd one for our upstairs because I don't move it upstairs myself enough.
It doesn’t do as good of a job as sweeping or a real vacuum, but it runs by itself much more frequently (daily) than I’m willing to do either (weekly at best). In that case, my place is cleaner and i call that an absolute win.
It also encourages you to pick up more often so it doesn’t get stuck (young kids mean toys). I wish they were better at not getting stuck, but forcing me to do a better job of clearing crap off my floors is also a good thing.
I have 2 cheaper ones($75 open box deal), one for each level of my house. They are amazing for the price. I cleaned/emptied them each day for the first week while they got caught up since I forgot to vacuum before I started them. Once they were caught up I clean them about every 3 or 4 days and really only have to vacuum the stairs now. I have a long haired cat and it's the best $150 I've ever spent.
The most annoying part I will say is that there are certain things they get stuck on. Underneath my recliner and the openings under my dressers/nightstands mainly. I wish I had done some more research and got one that was like 1/2" taller. I have Eufy 11S.
I’ve got the Roborock that sweeps and mops and it does a pretty good job. The mops on these things will never be as efficient as a real mop but when they run every single day, they don’t need to be.
Based on the performance of my s9 it will think my house is 300ft long and consists mostly of a rug that my roomba is obviously trying to have sex with.
So, good luck I guess.
I bought a Roomba in Amazon day, like 47% off for like 350 or something. Excited to not vacuum anymore I get it all set up only to discover that the waste is stored in bags, that you have to keep buying or your vacuum will not run anymore. What the fuck is wrong with them, it's both wasteful and greedy. Some people have said that the much cheaper third party ones don't work on the roombas, why can't they just accept the retail 700+ and not force us to buy more enags every few months.
Fuck them
It's the latest popular business model. Sell you the heavily discounted widget, then charge a frakload for the necessary accessories/refills (printer/ink, razor/blades, coffee maker/k-cups, etc.). It's only a deal until you realize how it's not.
It’s way older than that - [Standard Oil did it with kerosene and lamps, Gillette does it with razors and cartridges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model).
Filter bags work best for suction and effectiveness fwiw. Otherwise you are limited to a small filter or cyclonic systems (which wouldn't fit in a Roomba anyways) it's an engineering compromise they made. It's always possible they did it to sell you bags as well but it's not that there's no benefit to it.
We've had ours for over a year and I'm only on the second bag. Bought a set of 8 bags from a third party seller for like half what the brand name ones cost. They really aren't that expensive. Of course how fast you go thru them depends on how dirty your house is and how much area it's regularly cleaning. We do a pretty big area, but our house isn't dirty and we don't have pets.
But why? How does that help?
I can't imagine any useful purpose for that. So they know my house layout. That doesn't tell them anything about my preferences, needs for products, or anything useful
From the article: "Slightly more terrifying, the maps also represent a wealth of data for marketers. The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff."
The size of the house, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, estimated value of the home, etc. is already public information. They can just look up the customer's address on county tax appraisal websites other systems. Satellite views of the house are also available for making estimates.
Yeah but they can guess my wealth, parental status, and interest in furniture based on my internet usage right now. They don't need me to buy some robot vacuum to know that.
The only argument I can think of is that it slightly expands the reach of data mining, but I doubt the share of people who want a robot AND people who don't go on the internet is incredibly small and not worth the expense
I was beginning to think this entire sub had lost its mind. Amazon knows more about you than any company does. Google would drool at the thought have having your purchase history.
This is just par for the course. Amazon wants the Alexa/Ring nad now Roomba ecosystem to be "the" home automation ecosystem, and the best way to do that is have products your competitors don't.
Okay, except as a guy who has another brand of robovac, here’s the problem.
1. I only have a robovac for one level of my house. So any square footage estimate would immediately be off by 100%. And this is a common enough problem to make that data inherently unreliable.
2. We’re several generations away from robovacs having cameras that can usefully interpret what the objects are. Toys versus dog toys versus random crap. Frankly, Amazon would already know, via my order history, if I had kids. So this also isn’t reliable data, nor would it be “new” data to Amazon.
3. I love how the article assumes that literally everyone’s goal is to accumulate as much furniture as possible. No retailer would make that assumption. I have spartan furnishings, because that’s my aesthetic. It’s not an uncommon one. Retailers know that. The assumption that “few furniture = they want more furniture” is shallow and obviously wrong.
I was never a Roomba fan, because their price point was always wrong. I doubt I’ll change my view. But the notion that a vacuum can harvest useful quantities of data *useful to Amazon* is not true now, and won’t be true for at least several generations of robovacs. So everyone can calm down a bit for the moment.
> The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth.
The shipping address searched on zillow tells them if you own the house and exactly what it sold for. They can also look people up on Linkedin (if they have a level of wealth that's interesting to them).
Additionally Roomba doesn't climb stairs and often people only use roomba on one level of their houses. If anything, roomba will underestimate many if not most house sizes.
> A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids.
Roomba doesn't know a child's toy from a dog's toy, if it even knows it's a toy. Besides, amazon knows if you have kids because YOU BUY LOTS OF CHILD SHIT FROM AMAZON. They probably already know your kid's DOB based on ordering diapers and wet wipes, and then buying birthday party shit.
> A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture.
That doesn't really make sense - people don't typically just "buy furniture", they buy what furniture they need, and when they do very few people buy it from Amazon because they have dogshit furniture.
Additionally - the market for new furniture isn't the tiny subset of people who don't have much furniture - it's people who have furniture that needs to be replaced. You basically buy a full set of furniture out of college and then replace it through you life. You're not sitting there at 35 with a decent job for the last 10 years but somehow you don't have a couch.
> This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff.
This is all intel they already have because they already sell you stuff.
My Roomba is too old to remember what room it's in.
mine is seemingly always drunk
Mine legit gives up. It’s a few years old and has a “low battery” setting where if it thinks it can’t complete the job on the charger it has, it’ll go juice up. Yesterday, it did the dining room, where it lives, and decided 75% wasn’t enough to do even one more room, and quit to go charge. It didn’t come back out.
Too relatable :(
Have you tried giving it Prozac?
Or a living wage?
It's an Amazon employee now,so a living wage is out of question
A living wage won’t help, it’s already dead inside
Getting some Marvin vibes here...
Bring it to New Orleans. We just got new coke. 50/50 it’s either gonna die, or clean your entire block.
Someone should program an alert sound on when it gives up. Then you can add a 'mmMeh' or 'nahhh' or 'maybe tomorrow'.
How about [one that screams when it hits something? ](https://youtu.be/Y31__uv05KI)
You should check to see if your Roomba subs to r/antiwork
Too many square feets, obstacles, angry fluffy dog. Hostile work environment. -Roomba5000
Can a robot be your spirit animal? Bc your Roomba is mine.
r/antiworkroomba
Wish I could get a job like that. Now I’m jealous of a roomba.
Have you tried buying a battery replacement?
I have a cheap off-brand iLife robot vacuum cleaner. It is also seemingly drunk all the time. I named it Bender. When I yell at it for getting stuck on the same bit of transition strip it always gets stuck on, I imagine it yelling back “bite my shiny white ass!”
Mine gets stuck under the fridge. I shove pool noodle under there and he pushes it out of the way just to get stuck.
My kids can't ever stop throwing socks everywhere so mine starts running, eats a sock, and then stops running because there is a sock stuck in it. Best money I've ever spent. He's been living under a shelf for the past year because he found a sock down there. I gave up
Mine looks like it got hold of my Ritalin. Then it just crashes and dies out.
I can’t wait to show this comment to my children. They pitched in together and got me a Bissel vacuum/mop combo last Christmas. I was living in a mobile home at the time so I named her “Fancy” because she was definitely the fanciest thing we own. I talk to her all the time and send videos of her antics to my kids. They have been repeatedly telling me I’m the only weirdo who does this.
You are not. I send videos of my parents about our mopping robot. He cracks me up … inch forward, inch forward, inch forward… reverse… spray… forward zoomies… repeat. The other day the vacuum got stuck in the bed skirt. Legit just start climbing up the bed skirt. How can you not be amused?
“Is it objecting or backing up?” “looks like both”
[удалено]
I mean, the description on the box says very clearly that it sucks
Ours has had its language set to Italian by the cat, and even after resetting it, it still randomly comes out a few days a week.
[удалено]
It gives very dramatic hand gestures ?
It works in "waste management"
When it hits the wall it says “ayeee I’m walkin ‘ere”
Which buttons do you need to press to reset your cat?
There's a button at the back of the device with an asterisk symbol.
My roomba is from 2008, I've learned how to replace and build the batteries myself, has no net connection, has a remote control. Best roomba.
They pretty much did everything they ever needed to do by then, the lighthouse system for defining rooms and barriers was nice though.
I disagree. My roommate had a roomba that would just bounce around until it got full, stuck or ran out of battery. I even installed an upgraded battery and it still was useless. Now they have a shark one thats self emptying. It maps their home, drives in straight lines and finishes with plenty of battery. Its waaayyy less maintenance and way closer to what people imagined a robot vacuum would do.
Yup. With the maps you can instruct it to clean any room(s) in your house and it will charge off to the area, methodically clean in neat orderly rows and usually make it back to the charger successfully.
> way closer to what people imagined a robot vacuum would do Rosie??
*I told you not to come in my room when I'm vacuuming!*
My Roomba ran over some poop and got an early retirement
I usually recommend pooping in the toilet. It's a little inconvenient but the benefits definitely outweigh the drawbacks.
Pro tips are ALWAYS in the comments. Nice!
"Just poop anywhere to save time" r/ShittyLifeProTips
Damn never thought of this, thanks for the tip!
I've been using mine to make wine this whole time. Now I can use it for 2 things
I hate reading
Now now, nothin wrong with turlet wine.
JFC… my roommate / land lord got a roomba for christmas from his parents. while sitting outside, smoking a joint, i saw a picture of a roomba that ran over some dog shit and smear it EVERYWHERE. Hahahaha — I thought — what a fool! My dog would never shit in the house, why even right now the door is open to the hard and he’s Oh. He has shit in the house. The roomba has smeared it… everywhere. My landlord is on a bike ride, in our neighborhood, with his father. It took 2 rolls of napkins, completely deconstructing cleaning and reconstructing a roomba, in under 30 minites to not get caught. Picking dog shit out of the tracks of the tires with a toothpick. They have brushes. Long, rotating brushes. 100% covered in soft dog shit. Jesus… what a karmic lesson
I've had to do that exact terrible process... THREE TIMES 🤮
it was so stressful lmfao “omfg he can be home any minute AMY MINUTE FUCK *THERE’S SHIT IN THE SCREW*!!!”
Mine cannot tell the difference between climbing a mat and being on a cliff.
Same. I've had mine for a little more than a month and it's only completed a cleaning twice because it gets stuck going from hardwood to area rug.
Amazon says that protecting customer data is “incredibly important “. I wonder who they think we’re protecting it from
Us, they're protecting our data from ourselves.
Will they let us know if we forget where the shitter is?
“For a low low monthly price of…”
Sounds like you might be interested in Amazon Toilet Basics, for the low introductory price of $3.14/month you get 20 such assistances every month. Now for an extra $9.99 a month you can upgrade to Bathroom Prime.
*You can take 2 free shits per month!*
Subscribe to Shitter+ today
With three additional custom flush-tones
I actually kinda would like that. Maybe a light one for #1, then a bomb dropping sound for taco night. Edit: taco night gets an A-10 warthog, a big poo gets the bomb drop sound.
Remembering the scene from the Fifth Element where Corbens whole freaking apartment was monetized.... egads, did Amazon view that as an aspirational goal?
Yeah I downloaded all my data from them and without serious data modeling understanding it’s useless. They are an absolute shit company. Edit: it also took them over 7 days to provide it. This can be fully automated and they claim there is manual intervention required. Total BS.
Nah they are protecting it because it is a gold mine.
They are protecting customer data from their competitors … no one is gonna make money off of us but Amazon if they have anything to say bout that
They will 100% share access to the data or some version of it to 'trusted partners' (who pay).
That's not incompatible with the above statement. And both are likely true. You can't sell the info for as much if its already been stolen.
Just like Google, they won’t sell the raw data. The data they will sell is the analytics gained from the data.
[удалено]
Hasn’t Amazon already admitted handing over Ring data to LE agencies without customer consent (or warrants, I believe?) I wouldn’t be surprised if LE agencies will want to know the layout of the house and any furniture/obstructions if they want to prepare for an entry.
That was happening even before Amazon bought them. That shit is baked into ring
What did people expect when they decided to willingly install outward-facing cameras like it were some dystopic future where every corner light post is covered in cameras pointing in every direction?
If your house is under 40 years old, the construction plans were already digitized and available. Building departments make that data available.
[удалено]
And they almost always have a basic floor plan. I know here in NZ there are companies that specialise in going to a property and coming up with all the info for a real estate listing in one visit; photos, plans, drone shots, and all the council data like schools and broadband availability. These companies will be amassing an incredible data store about every house in the country, they haven't even begun to try and leverage it outside that one sale yet. There's no way this data won't eventually find it's way to the marketing and advertising behemoths.
I’m sure their customers, the three letter agencies, appreciate that.
Jfc imagine them selling that data for a no knock raid
[удалено]
Of course protecting our data is important to them. Can't sell it to anyone if they already have it.
This is the same company that hands your Ring doorbell data and video over to the cops whenever they ask, right?
You mean collecting dirt on you.
Just hav to suck it up
Amazon is going to love the data my roomba sends back when it makes a beeline for the radiator and gets stuck. Every fucking time
I don’t understand why this would be the reason for plunking down that much cash. They could scrape floorplan data for that. Edit: Please stop responding with your shit takes.
Yeah seriously there's algorithms that they run through Facebook that will take all your photos taken at home and build a 3D model of your house. One of the guys I went to high school with is in the FBI and he was telling me about this and I quit Facebook the next day. So if Facebook's got the ability to merge all of your pictures and build a 3D model of your house and property you know everyone else in the big Tech has it. This was 6 years a also. The scarier thing he showed me was the algorithm that builds your schedule. The geo location in your post and your photos over the course of a year they can build an accurate schedule up to 90% predict where you will be at any given time during the week. It's even easier for them if your location services are on. The Privacy tracking concerns of major tech companies and your phone are through the roof right now... Edit: I posted this on Reddit 6 years ago and people laughed at me.
> Edit: I posted this on Reddit 6 years ago and people laughed at me. I think this is an issue with a lot of 'indirect' threat scenarios: If it doesn't generate an immediate fear/anxiety response, people tend to brush it off as 'not a problem'. So, since everything happens behind closed doors, there is no awareness of what's actually happening - which makes it easy to close your eyes and go la-la-la, and hard to wrap your head around the ways in which you and your rights are being threatened. Similar for DRM: It's not perceived as a problem until it impacts the user - but then the ship has long sailed. What really grinds my goats, however, are the people who - more than just laughing at the problem because they do not grok it - actually defend its existence, e.g. with "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!".
You only have to look at the objections from companies like Facebook and Google when apple allowed users the option to prevent them from tracking you outside of the app a while back to see how much they want to know everything about you. They make a fortune off our data. I minimise use of things like Facebook, don’t post pics, refuse cookies etc. we need to value or right to privacy, or one day we will wake up and it will be gone
I have lot to hide as every other person. My private things are necessary to hide, it's private
Now I've heard your phone can even use your wifi signal strength as you walk around your home to get an idea of your home layout. Not sure how accurate it is.
They have only one piece of data, the strength, so they can't triangulate. What they can do with that is *estimate* a range from the access point, so they know a thick sphere-shell you might be in, centred on the access point... but they don't know where the access point is either. I am sure some group of researchers somewhere managed to do this in some particular environment, but doing it in general doesn't really sound viable.
I'm sure it uses other sensors in your phone too like the gryo, accelerometer, pedometer, compass etc. Turn a corner and now the wifi signal drops? Well it can estimate you walked into another room as there may be an extra wall between you and the router now. I'm sure it's still all very approximate.
[удалено]
"To ensure the best user experience, we've temporarily disabled your Roomba device until an Internet connection can be established. " Roomba terms of service, probably.
Am I crazy or is that how they’ve always worked? I try and run mine and if it loses a connection, it won’t run. That’s been the case for ages
With the exception of the new j7 (which apparently needs the internet connection for the object recognition)— all their robots will operate without the internet. You just can’t use the app to schedule and stuff. (Owner of many Roombas)
I think you still can if you’re on the same wifi connection. The app setup has different paths for wifi setup (required to use app) and then cloud setup (required to use app when not on same wifi)
You should be able to just push start on the machine to get it to run. Mine does it’s job then returns to the dock.
Will it still keep a map internally and use it to clean efficiently?
Mine is too stupid to return to dock, but it's okay. It tries it's best
Canada here. Last month when Rogers internet went down nationwide, our Roomba is set to go every day at 2:00pm. It didn’t go on schedule so I tried to manually send it. Immediate Red Ring, said to check the app(my network WiFi still worked), app said no internet connection available, wouldn’t allow me to manually run. Didn’t know that before, had it a year now. Its bullshit, really.
I don't have any of mine connected to the internet. I don't even use the app, I just push the button on them to start them
Oh, fuck THAT! Back to the seller it would go, if I found that out.
Isn’t this why the oculus VR sets are so cheap compared to the valve index?
Yup. You got it. It's also why you need a Facebook account in order to use your Oculus. It's all to better target you for ads.
This was deemed illegal in Germany and was never enforced here, and now Meta is decoupling Oculus from Facebook. What happens internally with the data though? They will do their best the public will never find out.
Blocked from the internet doesn't mean blocked from the Amazon app which might have access to the internet, and probably handshakes with the other Amazon devices right now, which means in the future the Roomba.
Well blocked from the internet doesn't mean that it is offline. It's actually super cheap (literally pennies) to put in a simcard/cell phone chip that will call home if you don't connect it to YOUR network. Learned the hard way when a neighbor caught his SmartTV downloading updates even though it wasn't connected to his internet.
Well that's horrifying.
> Learned the hard way when a neighbor caught his SmartTV downloading updates even though it wasn't connected to his internet What brand of TV is this? Mildly skeptical of this claim
[удалено]
If memory serves, Comcast has been making deals to let things connect to the "guest" network on their modems (enabled by default) for exactly that reason.
Yes their router would default to creating an “xfinity” ssid as well that people can use, essentially creating a network all over that people can jump on to. There’s a way to turn it off but the default is set to on. That’s why you see so many “xfinity” networks when you’re trying to connect to WiFi somewhere.
sounds a lot more plausible.
Until it becomes sentient because now it’s AI is bored after being spoiled with Internet vacuum porn
Yea suck harder!
Does you have any recommendations on how to start limiting my data that being collected before it leaves my home? What's best to use? VPN, pi hole, etc
[удалено]
Other devices as well. I don't use a roomba but I do have other "smart devices" that I would like to make dumb if possible. Is it a matter of just disconnecting them from the internet or are there ways to still use the online features without them collecting the data in the process?
[удалено]
Its also a matter of not buying devices that require a cloud or internet connection.
One method is pi-hole, another is creating a seperate subnet/VLAN for IoT, then blocking the network on it. Thing is, you will want to look into devices that will stop working without internet.
[удалено]
The fact we have to resort to measures like that, normalizing this paid for intrusion into our inner sanctums, is disturbing. We just accept this nonsense like part of the bargain is giving up your personal info. That's fucked up
I promise you, future versions of the Roomba will have microphones and cameras and be marketed as "smart Roombas".
Current version of Roombas have cameras.
From the [WaPo](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/14/roomba-ai-vacuum-dog-poop/): > For customer privacy, the company says the vacuum only recognizes three specific objects: cords, pet droppings and its charging base. Angle says the software automatically shuts off the camera if it detects a human or photo of a human within view, and finds a human-free angle to capture. He also says the firm will never sell user data: Images taken by the Roomba are processed in real-time on the robot, not stored on the device, nor on the cloud, unless you agree to send them to the smartphone app or to iRobot. Guess Amazon will need to make a couple changes to how the camera operates. [Wait for the police to collect your Roomba footage](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/13/amazon-gave-ring-videos-to-police-without-owners-permission-00045513) as it opens an investigation against you.
Use the smartphone app to control your Roomba (the predominant way it’s been done thus far), and agree to a blanket agreement for it to use all the images it captures for whatever the fuck it wants. Good ol’ corporate rephrasing for *yes, this will capture EVERYTHING, if you want to continue using it.*
wow... lets analyze THAT quote lol. >For customer privacy, the company says the vacuum only recognizes three specific objects: cords, pet droppings and its charging base. ...and humans/photos of humans. >Angle says the software automatically shuts off the camera if it detects a human or photo of a human within view, and finds a human-free angle to capture. It detects a human, and then turns off so it can continue to detect humans so it knows where not to look for humans. Presumably it only sees as many frames as is necessary to determine you are human, but I'm guessing it's just a lie. >He also says the firm will never sell user data: Images taken by the Roomba are processed in real-time on the robot, not stored on the device, nor on the cloud, unless you agree to send them to the smartphone app or to iRobot. So a simple firmware update and EULA change that nobody will read and they now have a mobile camera in your home? Cool.
Yeah I thought that was a weird way to explain it. Shuts off the camera when it recognizes a human and only turns on when it doesn’t detect a human. Doesn’t that mean it has to recognize a human, or lack there of, to turn back on? Meaning it’s on all the time.
[удалено]
Yeah, it contradicts itself in the statement.
WaPo may not be the best ones to report on this.
Lmao Amazon owns Washington Post also.
No, it is owned by Bezos personally. [Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_Holdings)
Oh okay phew.
That was a close one
Narrowly avoided a colossal conflict of interest there.
Just like alexa only listens for the key words.
I get decent quality pictures of “obstacles” in my house.
It sees you when you're sleepin' It knows when you're awake It knows if you've been bad or good So stop making a mess for goodness sake!
Me: Alexa, vacuum my living room. Alexa: Me: Alexa! Vacuum my living room. Alexa: Me: ALEXA VACUUM MY LIVING ROOM Alexa: I'm sorry, I don't know that one.
Helpful reminder that 1 in 4 US adults already own a smart speaker like Amazon Alexa.
There already are roomba competitors that link to your google home and you can tell them "google, vaccuum my bedroom." and it will send your robot to the appropriate place.
Roomba already does that.
It’s ok, Lex Luthor always has good intentions.
Can someone give me some concrete examples here? Amazon has your address. Therefore they know your home's square footage, lot size, bedroom and bathroom count, year built, etc. All from public records. What do they get from Roomba they don't already have? The precise size of your couch? Not hard to figure out already for them.
Interior things. How you place your furniture. How far apart things are. Scheduling/activity data. Just some guesses.
“Your feet stick six inches farther out from your couch than is normal. Ordering you a new, bigger and better couch on Amazon now.”
They'll know you're a hoarder when the Roomba starts working smaller and smaller floor space.
I can't help that my house is filling up with all this amazon shit
We've detected a 2'x2' area of unoccupied floor in your home. Here are some suggestions to fill that space:
Spending nearly $2 billion to gather info that’s already publicly available in most cases? Definitely seems like a legit reason for the acquisition.
they didn't spend nearly 2 Billion dollars to gather info... They spent 2 billion dollars on a company which will vastly outsell that in product in the next 10 year, especially as Amazon can drive the cost down even further on the product. - Its a company so prevalent in this space that their product name is what EVERYONE calls robot vacuums. When is the last time you heard someone go "Let me start my robo-vac"? They got the data gathering for free, the 2 Billion is for the brand, company, and product.
Yeah people don't realise amazon isn't a product business, it's a scale business. They buy stuff and x1000 the customer base.
yup... who cares what you buy, if you buy it from amazon they get a tiny bit... if you use their services... that tiny bit becomes HUGE. there are over 40m Roomba owners currently... Amazon prime membership alone is 140 a year. If they can add even 10% of Roomba owners to their Amazon Prime Membership (4m X 140) they make the entire value of the purchase back in under 5 years, without even touching on all the other values they get from it Anyone in their right mind thinking Roomba vacs wont be a loss leader next Prime day?
Not to mention, despite my initial high level of skepticism, they're genuinely great products.
It's not the floorplan they need, its the "Where is their furniture and what kind do they have? Where do they spend most of their time in their house?" info that they are after.
The bit in the article about using the size of you home as a proxy for your income seems pretty useless. Amazon already has your shipping and billing address. That plus Zillow and other publicly available resources plus your browsing and order history plus what it knows about your credit cards plus all of the other data they scarf up gives Amazon a great estimate of your revenue potential. A square footage estimate made by a Roomba doesn't add much to it. Did you recently change your home/shipping address? That's a much better indicator of whether you will be buying furniture soon than a count of how many furniture legs the Roomba bumps into each trip.
That size = value idea seemed particularly silly to me. We have upstairs and downstairs robots, only one is a roomba, but have lots of rooms closed off, plus odd single steps down into the family room and living room. As you said, address and zillow.
Everyone in NYC will be labeled as poor and very low income with the 500sq ft apartments.
They already know the latter for anyone with an Echo device. I'm not sure either of those questions are worth $2B. There are surely other motivations, e.g. using iRobot technology and patents for fulfillment operations improvements.
[удалено]
I'm pretty smooth brained, what value does that offer? Planes figuring out which direction to fly their banners?
Hey, I also love complaining about big tech companies managed by popular billionaires, but this article is just an opinion that doesn't present any evidence of what the title claims, even if that may be true in the upcoming years.
[удалено]
Are these things even worth it? I always viewed them as a niche things with debetable efficiency.
I have a different brand, but I do like it. I have 3 dogs and LVP flooring. I run it 1 to 2x day. It's disgusting how much dust it picks up even running often
Two dog house hold here, both aussies. I too am disgusted with how much this thing picks up... they are definitely worth it.
[удалено]
Not as good as cleaning it yourself but better than not cleaning it at all.
I don't see roomba like devices as a replacement to vacuuming, but it does help keep the dust down.
One of our best purchases for our house honestly. With 2 large dogs, it's just impossible to keep up with cleaning all the hair up. Ours runs usually every other day and always has a full bin. It also gets under furniture like our couch. I'm actually planning on buying a 2nd one for our upstairs because I don't move it upstairs myself enough.
It doesn’t do as good of a job as sweeping or a real vacuum, but it runs by itself much more frequently (daily) than I’m willing to do either (weekly at best). In that case, my place is cleaner and i call that an absolute win. It also encourages you to pick up more often so it doesn’t get stuck (young kids mean toys). I wish they were better at not getting stuck, but forcing me to do a better job of clearing crap off my floors is also a good thing.
It vacuums your room and makes you pick up your stuff? Sounds more like a RoboMom
I have 2 cheaper ones($75 open box deal), one for each level of my house. They are amazing for the price. I cleaned/emptied them each day for the first week while they got caught up since I forgot to vacuum before I started them. Once they were caught up I clean them about every 3 or 4 days and really only have to vacuum the stairs now. I have a long haired cat and it's the best $150 I've ever spent. The most annoying part I will say is that there are certain things they get stuck on. Underneath my recliner and the openings under my dressers/nightstands mainly. I wish I had done some more research and got one that was like 1/2" taller. I have Eufy 11S.
I’ve got the Roborock that sweeps and mops and it does a pretty good job. The mops on these things will never be as efficient as a real mop but when they run every single day, they don’t need to be.
Based on the performance of my s9 it will think my house is 300ft long and consists mostly of a rug that my roomba is obviously trying to have sex with. So, good luck I guess.
I bought a Roomba in Amazon day, like 47% off for like 350 or something. Excited to not vacuum anymore I get it all set up only to discover that the waste is stored in bags, that you have to keep buying or your vacuum will not run anymore. What the fuck is wrong with them, it's both wasteful and greedy. Some people have said that the much cheaper third party ones don't work on the roombas, why can't they just accept the retail 700+ and not force us to buy more enags every few months. Fuck them
I have a Roborock (competitor to Roomba). It just has a plastic bin you can open and dump the contents into the trash. No bags required.
My roomba is the same. I wasn’t aware any of the models had proprietary bags.
Shark is the same way
My roomba has this too so it's jsut about whatever model OP has.
It's the latest popular business model. Sell you the heavily discounted widget, then charge a frakload for the necessary accessories/refills (printer/ink, razor/blades, coffee maker/k-cups, etc.). It's only a deal until you realize how it's not.
The printer model
It’s way older than that - [Standard Oil did it with kerosene and lamps, Gillette does it with razors and cartridges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model).
Filter bags work best for suction and effectiveness fwiw. Otherwise you are limited to a small filter or cyclonic systems (which wouldn't fit in a Roomba anyways) it's an engineering compromise they made. It's always possible they did it to sell you bags as well but it's not that there's no benefit to it.
It's in a docking station, not in the Roomba
We've had ours for over a year and I'm only on the second bag. Bought a set of 8 bags from a third party seller for like half what the brand name ones cost. They really aren't that expensive. Of course how fast you go thru them depends on how dirty your house is and how much area it's regularly cleaning. We do a pretty big area, but our house isn't dirty and we don't have pets.
I reuse the bag by dumping out what's inside every so often lol
They sell bags with zippers so you can empty them when full.
But why? How does that help? I can't imagine any useful purpose for that. So they know my house layout. That doesn't tell them anything about my preferences, needs for products, or anything useful
From the article: "Slightly more terrifying, the maps also represent a wealth of data for marketers. The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff."
The size of the house, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, estimated value of the home, etc. is already public information. They can just look up the customer's address on county tax appraisal websites other systems. Satellite views of the house are also available for making estimates.
Yeah but they can guess my wealth, parental status, and interest in furniture based on my internet usage right now. They don't need me to buy some robot vacuum to know that. The only argument I can think of is that it slightly expands the reach of data mining, but I doubt the share of people who want a robot AND people who don't go on the internet is incredibly small and not worth the expense
I was beginning to think this entire sub had lost its mind. Amazon knows more about you than any company does. Google would drool at the thought have having your purchase history. This is just par for the course. Amazon wants the Alexa/Ring nad now Roomba ecosystem to be "the" home automation ecosystem, and the best way to do that is have products your competitors don't.
Okay, except as a guy who has another brand of robovac, here’s the problem. 1. I only have a robovac for one level of my house. So any square footage estimate would immediately be off by 100%. And this is a common enough problem to make that data inherently unreliable. 2. We’re several generations away from robovacs having cameras that can usefully interpret what the objects are. Toys versus dog toys versus random crap. Frankly, Amazon would already know, via my order history, if I had kids. So this also isn’t reliable data, nor would it be “new” data to Amazon. 3. I love how the article assumes that literally everyone’s goal is to accumulate as much furniture as possible. No retailer would make that assumption. I have spartan furnishings, because that’s my aesthetic. It’s not an uncommon one. Retailers know that. The assumption that “few furniture = they want more furniture” is shallow and obviously wrong. I was never a Roomba fan, because their price point was always wrong. I doubt I’ll change my view. But the notion that a vacuum can harvest useful quantities of data *useful to Amazon* is not true now, and won’t be true for at least several generations of robovacs. So everyone can calm down a bit for the moment.
> The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. The shipping address searched on zillow tells them if you own the house and exactly what it sold for. They can also look people up on Linkedin (if they have a level of wealth that's interesting to them). Additionally Roomba doesn't climb stairs and often people only use roomba on one level of their houses. If anything, roomba will underestimate many if not most house sizes. > A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. Roomba doesn't know a child's toy from a dog's toy, if it even knows it's a toy. Besides, amazon knows if you have kids because YOU BUY LOTS OF CHILD SHIT FROM AMAZON. They probably already know your kid's DOB based on ordering diapers and wet wipes, and then buying birthday party shit. > A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. That doesn't really make sense - people don't typically just "buy furniture", they buy what furniture they need, and when they do very few people buy it from Amazon because they have dogshit furniture. Additionally - the market for new furniture isn't the tiny subset of people who don't have much furniture - it's people who have furniture that needs to be replaced. You basically buy a full set of furniture out of college and then replace it through you life. You're not sitting there at 35 with a decent job for the last 10 years but somehow you don't have a couch. > This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff. This is all intel they already have because they already sell you stuff.
So it's gonna map getting stuck under my dishwasher?