Am I the only one confused by why a vacume needs a live video feed? Who’s sitting there thinking “I want to watch what my vacume sees!”
Ok so I used to work for iRobot, the OG robot vacuum maker. Robot vacuums used to vacuum randomly. To make them vacuum systematically, they need to map your house. One cheap way to do that is to use a camera roughly pointing at your ceiling and do Video SLAM. The camera identifies features on your ceiling and how they are changing to know where the robot is and map the room.
I guess ecovac thought they could add a camera feed feature for free since they already had a camera on the robot.
Huh, I thought they were “dog poop sensors”
It’s both, I have the Roomba with the camera on the front and it can sometimes avoid dog poop and wires on purpose (and sometimes navigate, but it mostly seems like it navigates like the other models with no cameras by bumping into things that don’t ever move)
The problem isn’t the video feed per se, it’s that the business model of IoT companies, especially cheap IoT companies, include selling off customer data to advertising and other surveillance capital type entities.
So, cheap hardware, lax security at best, and a business model that requires all their devices to have an internet connection to function properly, or access its full feature set.
Yet when I wanted to make my vacuum speak like Consuela from Family Guy I couldn’t do it.
And nobody posted This yet!? The Roomba That Screams When it Bumps Into Stuff
imagine now somehow combining its sensor data with outputs from a LLM everyone would think that their roomba has become sentient
True supervillain stuff. :-D
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Unfortunately no support for Ecovacs.
“I suck!”
— robot vacuum (probably)How could it have been worse. A fucking basic appliance was hijacked. Ofc its not weaponized, that would have made it worse I guess
Seems that blocking my robot vac’s Internet access when it’s not in use is not so paranoid after all.
Why won’t they say the brand? Which brand are they?
