Roomba Collecting Consumer Information to Sell
Marie Donlon | July 26, 2017
Image credit: Tibor Antalóczy / CC BY-SA 3.0iRobot, the makers of Roomba, want to help make your home more sophisticated and “smart” by selling the information it gathers while it cleans.
Equipped with sensors, cameras and software, iRobot imagines that the spatial mapping information Roomba collects will be linked in the future to information collected from other home devices, such as the Amazon Echo and smart thermostats, so that companies like Amazon or Apple can sell a customer products based on the layout of the customer’s home.
“There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot Corp, told Reuters.
With concerns for consumer privacy making headlines, iRobot assures that the decision will be up to the consumer and they can opt out of having their information sold.