MIT Technology Review writes that a Roomba photographed a woman on the toilet. From the article: In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. Newer AI-driven things like cars, drones and even robot vacuum cleaners use cameras to help them navigate their environments. AI image software and chips learn over time (with human help, how to identify objects as things like buildings, sky, plants, people, walls, furniture, stairs, etc. Here it seems some of the pics of the learning process got loose (see pic in the article). The idea of something running around your house getting pictures of everything (??) does beg some questions..
I read an article about that elsewhere. I would never put one of those things (or an Alexa) in my home. One guy on another forum commented that his "smart oven" consumed over 1.8gb of internet bandwidth communicating "something" per day!!!
Yup. I have both of those...my first Apple products that I started using in July of 2021. But I mistrust Google more. I think I commented on an article where the state of Massachusetts had Google push the "COVID Tracker" app to every Android in the state when the voluntary adoption rate was "too low." The Users were never told...it "just happened."
I don't trust my Alexa. I think she listens to everything that goes on in my home. And she's probably incredibly bored.
Alexa does listen to everything, and it's all recorded. There was an instance where a guy happened to stumble upon the recorded conversations of his neighbors (I forget how this happened) and later recounted those conversations to them. After Amazon got caught, they fessed up and claimed that it's "to better respond to your requests," or "to give your requests a refined context," or some such garbage.
Google “Nest” A/C controllers are also on the list of potential home spies. Buying from reputable carriers might be okay but there’s a heavy warning out there about buying from EBay and other handlers because the controllers can be manually modified to spy. https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nest-spying-hack,news-19290.html
I attend an annual shareholder meeting hosted by my electric co-op. We recently ran fiber to every single member's home...connecting is optional. The president asked how many would be on board with installing these smart devices and connecting them to the fiber network. The near-riot response let me know I was among friends. I have yet to have the fiber installed in my place, and plan on using it for TV programming, but am worried about the spying risk I would be incurring.
I have two robo-vacs and I'll never be without one again... they are real time savers. That said, I can't imagine why anyone would care what's going on in my house or when I'm sitting on the potty. I do turn off Alexa and Siri (or at least I think I do), but I don't waste time worrying about smart devices. Who cares, really?
The household mapping, by vacuums or other devices, all the sounds in a home, car, workplace, grocery, department store, or outside, within 'earshot' of a 'smart?' phone, or a computer, or some other appliances including doorbells, all the sounds are recorded and 'saved', and are available to anyone with the money , or hackers. To be used against anyone, anytime, anywhere, whenever ...... rarely if ever to help them.
I sincerely doubt that my robo-vac's map of my downstairs is going to ever be "used against me." What a ridiculous thing to say. I live in a neighborhood of tract houses where several houses on the street have the same floorplan, but a different façade. So anyone who can figure out the arrangement of windows/doors can pretty much tell exactly what the floorplan is. Gasp.
I am suspicious, but, at this point in my life, I'm not overly concerned with too much of this stuff. I don't sit around my house conspiring to overthrow the government, except maybe on Wednesdays, and I can pretty much guarantee that no one wants to spy on me in the bathroom. Other than that, if someone wants to spy on me in my office, they can simply stand on the sidewalk and watch me because I rarely close the curtains. That said, I have no doubt that anything that is said within the distance that my iPhone or any Alexa products can pick up is being sent somewhere. I doubt that they hire someone to sit in the basement of the NSA listening in on me talking to my cats or arguing with my wife, but I expect that it's all being filtered electronically, probably flagging on keywords. That would be on the government's end of things. On the commercial side, I believe that I know for a fact that my iPhone is sending along everything that is said for the purpose of product placement. You can test that for yourself by discussing a product that you've never before discussed actually buying. You won't necessarily see it every time because they may not have advertising clients lined up for it, but there's a good chance that you'll start seeing ads for that product on your Facebook page or elsewhere where advertisements are displayed.
This is basically how I look at it, too. Since they can read things like license plates from satellites in the sky, and have more devices that are capable of spying than we could possibly avoid, even if we moved off grid and out into the hills somewhere, and since I am not doing anything that is going to have a repercussion if it is spied on and overheard or seen; I just live my life and not worry about it. My iPhone is how I track all of my medical information and stats, and I want that. My internet is how I keep in contact with my friends and family, and I am not giving that up either. Just getting rid of the little robot vacuum is not going to make any difference, or the Nest thermostat either; so I just use what I want and need to be happy, and not worry about the spying since I can’t avoid it anyway.