When you watch a Roomba in action when it cleans a home, you might be impressed with how it can figure out when to stop, when to turn, and how it avoids objects and obstacles in its way. We have to admit that it looks pretty amazing in action, but did you also consider the fact that while it is navigating your home that it is also collecting data about it?After all, in order to navigate the twists and turns of your home, Roomba has to create a map of sorts, and now it looks like the map of your home could soon be sold to the highest bidder, or at least that’s what a report from Reuters suggests that it quotes Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot, the maker of Roomba.
According to Angle, he is hoping that iRobot could make a deal with one of the Big Three tech companies and sell them that data. “There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared.”
It sounds like it could be a privacy nightmare for Roomba owners, but the thing is a floorplan of your home doesn’t really tell anyone who stays in there, what you do, what your passwords are, and what kind of conversations you are having. In fact when viewing homes, more often than not you can get your hands on a floor plan relatively easily. The idea here is that the data could help tech companies improve on their products, like routers with better reach, aircon with better airflow, and so on.