Yet another

For my personal serie “yet another reason to avoid x”, today we have Roomba:

Intimate Photos By Roomba Vacuums Leaked Online

Your robot vacuums are watching you and the resulting imagery of your most private moments can, horrifically, get leaked online… iRobot … confirmed that gig workers shared intimate photos… to social media.

Source: Slashdot.org

Like most other recent proprietary appliances – phones, operative systems, robots and so on – they send a lot of data to their manufactors and inevitably, it was only a matter of time: sooner or later such data leaks occour.

Becuase we can’t truly control things running proprietary software.

As far as I know there is no competitor of iRobot that publish sources of their software and while iRobot does actually have an “hacker kit” to let people program a Roomba-like robotm it is far for easy to reflash a Roomba with your own program. Because the first change many people will want to make is to avoid uploading photo of yourself and the data of your home to someone else.