Very intimate images of users and captured by a robot vacuum equipped with a camera were shared on social networks.
For several years now, robot vacuum cleaners have been equipped with cameras, capable of both improving navigation in the house, but also of detecting objects on the floor.
Intimate photos shared on the web without any precaution
This is the case of a development model designed by the iRobot brand, the leader in the sector across all ranges, and recently acquired by Amazon. This Roomba j7 was sent to several testers in 2020, in order to obtain the maximum possible data on usage habits, but also to collect the images used to train the machine learning model.
Unfortunately for the testers, several images shared on social networks were discovered by MIT Technology Review, and among the shots, some very intimate.
Between different views of the interior of the owners of the robot and the rooms of each house, we can see the photo of a user sitting on her toilet, her pants down.
The training of image analysis systems can lead to drifts
How did these pictures end up on the web? iRobot does not process its data alone. The brand works with a specialized American company, Scale AI, which processes images and trains the image recognition engine.
To categorize the different objects detected by the robot vacuum cleaner (a table, a pair of shoes, a toy, etc.), Scale AI calls on service providers, responsible for consulting all the images manually and naming each element of the image spotted by the device with a label.
Scale AI and its subcontractors are bound by confidentiality undertakings, but not all of them seem to respect them. If the intimate photos found here have been shared on Discord rooms or private Facebook groups, the images can quickly break out of those closed circles. iRobot for its part takes refuge behind these confidentiality agreements, and recalls that the testers could delete the images that they did not wish to see shared during the test.
Other manufacturers have been questioned about the collection of data from their camera-equipped robot vacuum cleaners and hide behind their TOS. Indeed, even after marketing, these devices continue to send data, made anonymous, to further improve recognition and artificial intelligence.
While they claim that images containing nudity are automatically removed during analysis, faces are not considered sensitive data and are shared, in order to allow robots to more easily recognize a human in the field of the image. camera. In the example of iRobot and its test vacuum, the images of a child are never blurred. A professor of technology, however, assures the MIT Technology Review that the silhouette is enough and that face analysis is useless today.
So be careful when you agree to “improve the services” of your device by ticking the box when validating the T&Cs to avoid as much as possible the sharing of your personal information on the servers of the various manufacturers. iRobot has announced that it has ended its collaboration with Scale AI.
Source : MIT Technology Review
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