Editor’s note, August 8, 2022: In 2017, we did an exclusive interview with Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, about Roomba privacy issues. Last week, Amazon announced the acquisition of iRobot, which has reignited questions about the privacy of Roomba devices. We reached out to Colin Angle to ask if iRobot’s privacy policy would remain unchanged, but the company has yet to respond. While waiting for the answer, here is our 2017 interview.
It had been a rough week for iRobot, the company behind the popular Roomba robot vacuums.
It all started with an interview in Reutersin which the company’s chief executive, Colin Angle, made it clear that iRobot was selling its customers’ home mapping data.
Here is iRobot’s response:
First of all, iRobot will never sell your data. Our mission is to help you keep a cleaner home, and ultimately help the smart home and the devices in it work better.
There’s no doubt that a robot can help your home be smarter. It’s the data it collects to do its job and the relationship of trust between you, your robot, and iRobot that’s key to doing that. The information that is shared should be controlled by the customer and not as a data asset that a company can exploit. This is how data is handled by iRobot today. Customers have control over their sharing. I would like to clarify that this is how the data will be handled in the future.
You may also want your robot to work with other connected devices in your home. For this to work, we will also need your permission and we will always take care to secure the means of communication between devices.
Together, we’re creating a future where robots help people live richer lives and maintain their independence as they age. These conversations are valuable in that they help clarify our mission and our commitments to our customers – and see our commitment challenged and tested.
I hope this will help clarify our position.
I had more questions for Colin Angle and iRobot, which they kindly answered. As with the letter above, the responses have not been edited.
The article of Reuters indicated that iRobot was in talks to sell the data. Can you tell us if this is a misinterpretation by the reporter or an erroneous statement by Colin Angle? Were there, in fact, ever any currency talks or data talks?
It was a misinterpretation. [Colin Angle] never said that iRobot would seek to sell maps or customer data to other companies. iRobot has not had conversations with other companies about data transactions, and iRobot will not sell customer data.
Where are data such as photos or images taken by the camera stored? Are they sometimes stored away from home? If so, how is the imagery data used? Are they just parsed and sent back to the robot, or are they used to feed a larger database?
Roomba 900 series robot vacuums capture mapping and navigation information via vSLAM, which stays on the robot. On all Wi-Fi-enabled Roomba, usage data (e.g., how long has it been cleaning, how far has it traveled, has it encountered any crash codes, etc.) error, is it working properly) can be sent to the cloud for display on the customer’s mobile device. Images used for navigation are NOT sent to the cloud.
If a user agrees to have their map data displayed on their mobile device, the map created by Roomba during a cleaning job is sent to the cloud where it is processed and simplified to produce a map that ultimately appears in the iRobot HOME app.
It’s also important to point out that the camera doesn’t see things the way we do. The robot perceives its environment as a pattern of bright and dark dots in its field of vision. This pattern allows Roomba 900 series to locate or confirm its position on the map, allowing it to clean an entire level of a home. The camera is a low-resolution camera that tracks multiple points in a room, such as along the edges of a table or the light and dark contrasts of a window on a wall. She uses these reference points to continually build and update her map of the rooms in a house.
Source: ZDNet.com