Our household (and I suspect many with us) bought a Roomba specifically to not give the Chinese government a roving camera in our home. Ouch!

I don't think there are tens of millions still in use.

Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.

I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.

I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.

I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.

If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.

I worry a lot about privacy in general but its hard for me to figure out the danger posed by my roborock. I suppose it has the floor plans of my house and knows we vacuum on Saturdays. It doesn't seem to know if the object passing by is me or my cat.

Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.

What is the concern?

US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire.

From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.

You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.

Nope, not all of them are connected to the internet and not all of them have cameras.

Definitely not all live and functioning. In fact I suspect less than 10m are actively used. It is a company that has been around for years and it has run into sales issues that last few years with competition and their products have tech product lifespans of around 3 years I suspect.

So the actual problem is the "feature" set of the vacuum cleaners, not the nationality of the new owners, right?

I would assume that 60-80% of these are now defunct. They break and even though they can be repaired (I did with my old one, so old it’s not even internet connected) people just don’t.

> If they're taken offline, they stop working.

If people ask me what's wrong with the so called modern technology, this is it.

Local-first system paradigm should be made mandatory and default, not optional [1].

[1] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

> More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.

Does comparing sales to households make any sense though? You'd need to figure out (40MM - Roombas in landfills) / average Roombas per household.

I've been buying Roombas since the very first one (I've had four), but stopped buying them when they started including internet connectivity and cameras.

That was a total dealbreaker for me. No vacuum cleaner needs that.

I have a Roomba. Never connected it to wifi or a phone app (no phone). Works great.

Sounds to me like we need to figure out how to flash our own custom firmware or do some fun DNS tricks to keep our data to ourselves.

Take that with a grain of salt (typhoon).

If they're taken offline, they stop working.

I think this is a bit of hyperbole. I haven't had my Roomba hooked up to the internet in at least four years. It works fine.

The only thing is that I have to start it by pushing the button on top, instead of using a phone app.

American tech companies have already built an apparatus of mass surveillance that works hand in glove with our government to violate our constitutional rights on a regular basis.

But it turns out that an economy based on rent extraction and enshittification can’t in the long run compete with one based on a real economy of industry, agriculture, and public services.

We should have privacy laws including mandated user control of user data. In my view, scaremongering around China just demonstates how uncompetitive the US is, in the long run. We should set our sights higher than merely begging to trade one form of technofeudalism for another.

> Chinese owner .... inside people's homes

They made the devices. I would say its fair to assume they already had access to the data if they needed it. Other than the fact they legally own it now I don't think this makes much difference from before.

Why are you concerned about china having access to this data anyway? I'm far more concerned about how much access the US gov has to this type of data. They can easily use it against someone in the country they control if they want.

I don't understand how you can sell 40 million units and go bankrupt.

How many users does TikTok have again? Talking about internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots...

I take it you also believe then that every third person on the planet has an iphone, yes?

(Apart from the innumeracy, also the gall to still launder this type of conspiracy theories in 2025, after the entire world can see you now for what you really are. Mindbending)

Well, not to worry. The Biden Admin FTC and the EU ensured this outcome in the interest of making sure consumer rights are protected. Therefore, consumer rights must be better protected in this scenario.

Why are you more afraid of Chinese billionaires surveilling on you than American billionaires?

What is the significance to you in just a change of owner here? Relative to the situation already?

I’d rather have the Chinese than the Americans.

I appreciate the alarm. However, I don't know if we should feel China having this is less safe than an America, European, or other country. I think we have seen that whatever alleged rights to privacy and data protection we have are becoming more-and-more meaningless as the corporatocracy of the US manifests itself more.

I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.

I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.

Basically, 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.