This!

I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.

I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.

It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.

The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.

I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.

Why not? Unless you are a Chinese citizen, it arguably makes more sense to grant access to the Chinese government rather than the US government. The PRC generally shows little interest in non-citizens while the US government frequently goes after people beyond its borders (e.g. Meng Wanzhou, Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried, Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, etc.).

Since this can be a significant security issue for the state, why doesn't the government sponsor a security audit of the software. Does it upload the data or everything is done on the device? (Also, will have to keep up with the updates)

I figured this would happen given how crap Roombas have been since they fired or lost all their engineering talent years ago.

So I went with a roborock since it is superior but completely blocked it from ever communicating outside my home.

Works great, there are plenty of ways to modify roborock vacuums and load up other software even.

Why didn't you just buy one with no camera at all?

Why do you think they want to see the inside of your house, and what do you think they'd be able to do with the information?

Ironically we bought a Roborock (Chinese brand with close links to Xiaomi) and didn't connect it to the internet (checked this would work before we bought it).

If you don't want the scheduling and other app features, and are happy switching it on when you need it, it works fine.

Motivation for an offline one was more than just cameras, also that it wouldn't be bricked by an update one day, but still...

Well, I hope you learned your lesson and now won't blindly trust any corporation again, but rather demand open code and full control over the device you bought. Especially if it is a moving camera in your home...

At least in the US, the Chinese government realistically should have been the least of your worries. What's China gonna do, if they caught you reading the Quran, or snorting crack? They could livestream your marriage proposal in WeChat to a billion people and you wouldn't ever notice. Meanwhile Snowden revealed, covertly watching random people through webcams is a leisure activity at the NSA, a national institution incidentally sharing jurisdiction with you. And evidently, your wife's death in a car accident may become a trending video at Tesla headquarters, while they deny your claims for a lack of such evidence.

They were so proud of how they were one of the early ones to move their entire manufacturing process to China. Sorry, they always (could have) had a camera in your home

How far did you take this? (did you check out the Roomba supply chain at all?) Thanks

What is not for sale today, can be for sale tomorrow. Even Apple and Alphabet, should their leaders see greater market value in selling data rather than not selling it.

Back when Amazon was going to buy Roomba so they could use the cameras to sell us crap and/or sell the feed to law enforcement, I unplugged ours.

They were unimaginably unreliable compared to our older Roombas, and I was kind of shocked how little we missed them.

Anyway, I looked into getting a secure (or at least not malicious) alternative. At the time, the best bet was to get a Chinese model, then MITM its connection to the cloud + run your own server locally.

At that point, I realized it was less effort to just manually vacuum the house and moved on. I'm certainly not the only one, given the size of the modder community for the Chinese competitors.

Now, I wonder how far the modders are from buying a handful of commodity components + just 3d printing the rest of the robot, since that's less effort than dealing with enshittification.

this age, feels like the most dangerous thing the Chinese government could do is sell that data back to our government.

Genuine non snarky question:

Did you weigh data collection, persistence and transferability before purchase and then conclude that the risk/benefit was there?

At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.

I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.

But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.

As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.

Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.

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