iRobot, maker of the popular automated vacuum ‘Roomba, ‘ wants to begin mapping your home and selling the data to the highest bidder.
Roomba was the futuristic cleaning bot each of our 12-year-old selves once dreamed of. Today it’s a commodity in a space full of cheaper and (arguably) just-as-good competitors. Luckily for iRobot (Roomba’s parent company) , its future is less about the dirt on your floor, and more about the dirt it can sell to Amazon, Apple, and Google.
According to a report from Reuters, iRobot plans to begin collecting (and selling) floor plans for its users’ homes. The data collected would detail the distances between furnishings, total floorspace of the dwelling, and could presumably track how often it empties the canister based on your relative floorspace (an indicator of whether you’ re dirtier or cleaner than other households of the same size) .
Purchasing iRobot seems to make more sense than buying its mapping data, at least for the big three. But either way the deal goes down, assuming it actually does, the data is just another piece in a puzzle that’s painting a scarily-accurate picture of our lives.
And the security implications are huge.
Amazon could, for example, use the data to better target your homepage visits or search results. Cleaner houses, for instance, could get more recommendations for cleaning tools and supplies — since dirty households probably aren’ t all that interested. Or, it could completely change which products are marketed to people of different income brackets. Home size as it relates to the median in your area is a direct correlation of wealth, in a lot of cases.
Or there’s Facebook, who could add another notch in its belt by giving advertisers even more targeting options. Using map data to shore up income estimates on each user — or the number of people living in the same household — offers a myriad of new options for advertisers to attract upper-middle class parents living in large homes in a suburb of Los Angeles, for example.
And if it sounds like science fiction, remember that iRobot completed an upgrade in March that made Roomba compatible with Amazon’s Alexa.
This level of connectivity could just be the first of many designed to communicate all sorts of things you probably thought were private: everything from temperature settings on your Nest thermostat, how often you use your August smart lock, or even the contents of your Samsung smart refrigerator .
Each of these is just an additional puzzle piece that helps giant companies paint a bigger picture, a more individualized one, of their customers.
The future is here.
Roomba vacuum maker iRobot betting big on the ‘smart’ home on Reuters
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