The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me
100 points by Garbi
100 points by Garbi
It is a good idea then to mention valetudo project. It allows to take back a lot of vacuum devices and run them offline. I personally have one with Valetudo, and second which I've never connected to Internet, because I have no skills and time to unlock an access. But one day I might be ready to finally take it back.
100% this. I'd recommend anyone, with the technical experience or desire to learn, buying a vacuum to consult the Valetudo device list (including instructions, which vary in difficulty between devices).
The Golden Rule: Never use your primary WiFi network for IoT devices. Treat them as strangers in your home.
I purchased a security camera system at Costco a number of years ago. It was supposed to be a decent system and my church has had a few break-ins, so I figured it was time. The company was a western brand (even had a "Proudly a [Country] company!" on the website), so I went with it.
After I unboxed it and plugged it in, the GUI looked really bad. The English was terrible and the interface looked off. I poked around and discovered they were a Chinese camera that was just rebadged by this western company. I had plugged two cameras into my network to set them up at that point, and immediately removed them. The other 5 cameras never touched the Internet.
I firewalled the system quite heavily so that I could reach in to see the status and nothing could reach out. The two cameras that had touched the Internet behaved exactly like this author describes. After ~30 days, they refused to connect to the DVR anymore and said I had to connect to the Internet for it to authenticate. Needless to say, they are not going to connect again.
Even if you do your due diligence in choosing brands, do more to see where the actual make/model come from and if you're really buying the brand you think you are. If it is cheap, there's probably a reason.
In 2022, images from iRobot vacuums, including people undressed and using the toilet, were shared widely on Facebook. It turned out the company had sent over 2 million real images to a low-cost gig-worker service for human-guided training and those workers were not entirely trustworthy. Not long after, iRobot went out of business.
At the very least, don't buy robot vacuums with cameras!
Not long after, iRobot went out of business.
Looking at their website and Wikipedia, they don’t really seem out of business… there was a failed acquisition and layoffs in 2023/4 but they still seem around.
See https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/. The images were shared in a private Facebook group for workers on the AI training service. iRobot says that these images were not from normal iRobot vaccums.
iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020. All of them came from “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,” the company said in a statement. They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. According to iRobot, the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,” and it was up to those paid data collectors to “remove anything they deem sensitive from any space the robot operates in, including children.”
iRobot did not go out of business, although they have suggested that they might go out of business next year. This has less to do with any backlash from their robots' privacy policies and more to do with competition and their failed acquisition by Amazon.
If anyone else is on the market for smart vacuums, Kärcher is just bringing out new models by the end of this year. It's possible that theirs are also manufactured in China, but an important difference is that being an European company, their customers should be covered by EU Data Protection. Which is much better than what any of those Chinese companies or iRobot promise.
The more "smart" garbage we are flooded with, the more I want a region friendly buyer's list of appliances that have been vetted both for quality and security. Not "smart" technology, but I spent a few hours of my weekend taking apart the pump in my LG Dishwasher because, just like many others, it started to make a grinding noise a few months post-warranty. (it looks like it's a ball bearing issue)
This led to a discussion with a friend about their Bosch brand dishwasher, which was no-frills, cost effective, and has been working well for ~10 years. I feel Wirecutter was this back in the day but I don't think it's the case anymore.
AI slop cover image, closed tab.
Pretty sure it's LLM text as well - the cadence, the emdashes, the semicolons are all telltale signs. Every time I read something and realise that it isn't written by a human two thirds of the way in, I feel a bit uneasy, although I can't fully articulate why. The post was interesting but I would still prefer to read something written by a person.
The funny thing is that OP probably spent a lifetime's worth of vacuuming time on reverse-engineering his vacuum. That is the curse of these 'smart' devices, I find myself debugging and reverse-engineering them so much that they do not save any time.
To be fair, he probably had a lot more fun this way and got a good story out of it: the same would not be true of time spent pushing a vacuum.
Note that I still vacuum the old fashioned way, not because of spyware, etc, but because I don’t trust a Roomba-type device not to ruin the carpet if one of our pets has an accident…
True. Also, you cannot put your vacuuming experience on your resume. Unless you apply for a janitor job, in which case your self-discipline in refraining from opening, disassembling and reverse-engineering the vacuum will be greatly appreciated.
Sadly, I see no mention of the BrahmanTek Inflationary Relativator that allows my Shark roombalike to randomly phase itself into and out of pocket dimensions from time to time. This physics-breaking module is the only thing that explains why the damned vacuum will disappear, sometimes for days, while I search high and low for it, its pleading "I'm stuck" cries barely audible from beyond the veil of this reality. Maddening.
I'm feeling good about purposefully purchasing a dumb robovacuum. No wifi, no bluetooth. No mapping state, but it turns out that a well executed random walk works just fine.