How Do I Know if My Roomba is Taking My Pictures?
iRobot Roomba robot vacuum is a very convenient and help you a lot in you day-to-day cleaning. Roomba robot vacuums come with a connected-home technology and have the potential of collecting a lot of data from the private setting of our premises.
Recently, the images of children’s faces, layout of a premises, and even someone sitting on the toilet sear were captured by Roomba vacuums in North America, Asia, and Europe. Moreover, these pictures, that were taken by Roomba vacuum, were found in a private Facebook group for gig workers in Venezuela.
Let’s learn whether this robot vacuum takes picture or it is a hyped story.
Does Roomba take pictures?
We know you are still worried about the question – whether or not Roomba takes your private pictures? Well, iRobot asys that it does not spy on regular consumers. However, nothing stops the iRobot Roomba robot vacuum from collecting large amounts of precise information form users’ homes.
Roomba vacuums collect this data and information while mapping out users’ homes. It involves drawing a detailed map of the entire house during the initial cleaning. When talking about the iRobot J7 model, it can collect more precise data with the help of a front-facing AI-powered camera. This feature not only gives it an aedge over its competitors, but also comes with a lot of privacy risks.
How did this privacy breach happen?
The pictures were taken in beta testers’ houses. They were returned to the servers of iRobot. They were subsequently sent from iRobot servers to service providers, such as Scale AI, who outsource the training and labelling of data, often known as data labelers or data annotators. These people are essentially gig workers whose task it is to add more context to various types of training data, such as photographs, videos, texts, or audio, so that an algorithm can understand what it is hearing.
The data labelers in Venezuela who provided the photographs to us shared them on these Facebook and Discord groups without any intention of violating anyone’s privacy, to be clear. These testers were just trying to get help on how to determine some of the strange shapes in homes and countries with different setups.
How do I stop Roomba from taking my pictures?
As discussed, the higher end models from Roomba, such as the J7+, can recognize and take your private pictures by itself. Moreover, it can share them with you over the smartphone using the iRobot Home app. It becomes more risky when these images and data are shared through your smartphone.
But you can stop all this from happening! Want to know how? You can opt-out to not share your data with iRobot. You can go to the iRobot Home app and then go to the Settings. After that, follow the in-app prompts to opt-out from sharing the data and other information.
Have any issue or doubts related to Roomba?
Well, it is pretty common to have doubts or issues related to the iRobot Roomba robot vacuum. If still have any doubts regarding the privacy breach or any other thing, feel free to discuss it with us. In case you have any issues with your robot vacuum, feel free to talk to our support team for further assistance.
