“From a privacy perspective, this is a nightmare,” said one anti-monopoly critic. “From an antitrust perspective, this is one of the most powerful data collection companies on Earth acquiring another vast and intrusive set of data.”
Amazon on Friday expanded its capacity to connect to and collect information about consumers’ homes and private lives, announcing its plan to purchase of iRobot Corp., the maker of the popular Roomba vacuum.
The e-commerce giant announced it will acquire the company for $1.7 billion in an all-cash deal, taking control of one of its competitors following Amazon’s release last year of Astro, its own “smart” home assistant, which can move between rooms in a home and recognize faces.
But the purchase said Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, “is not just about Amazon selling another device in its marketplace.”
“It’s about the company gaining still more intimate details of our lives to gain unfair market advantage and sell us more stuff,” he said.
Like Amazon’s other home products including Alexa and Ring, Roomba can connect to smartphones and WiFi. The vacuum creates a map of users’ homes so it can tell where furniture and doors are as it cleans floors.
“With Ring, Alexa and now Roomba, Amazon tracks EVERYTHING that happens inside your house (even who visits you),” said economist and entrepreneur Raoul Pal.
In 2017, iRobot CEO Colin Angle told Reuters that his company was considering selling data collected from customers’ homes by Roombas to companies including Amazon and Google, helping the corporations discern what and how to market products.
“Maps of the inside of your home can tell a lot about a person,” Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Jamie Williams told BuzzFeed at the time. “For instance, how you lay out your living room could disclose whether watching TV is a central part of your life.
It could disclose whether you have pets. How often you rearrange furniture. This information wouldn’t be worth a lot to advertisers if it didn’t reveal highly sensitive information about the inside of the home.”
The purchase of iRobot comes two weeks after Amazon announced its acquisition of One Medical, a private healthcare provider, for $3.9 billion.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among the critics of the deal, warning Amazon’s foray into medical care would not “provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way” but would only serve to make Amazon founder Jeff Bezos “even richer.”
Ron Knox, a researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said Amazon’s purchase of iRobot “may be the most dangerous, threatening acquisition in the company’s history,” adding that it “is bad EVEN IF you’re only worried about whether the deal will hurt competition.”
“Jeff Bezos has said that Amazon wants to buy its way to dominance,” said Knox. “By snatching up Roomba and pairing it with its vast monopoly power fueled by its Prime system, it would do just that.”
“From a privacy perspective, this is a nightmare,” he added. “From an antitrust perspective, this is one of the most powerful data collection companies on Earth acquiring another vast and intrusive set of data. This is how privacy concerns and antitrust go hand in hand.”
Weissman said federal regulators “should not allow Amazon to suck up iRobot/Roomba.”
“The last thing America and the world needs is Amazon vacuuming up even more of our personal information,” he said. “Amazon should not be permitted to leverage its retail market power to expand its market share of connected home devices.
Originally published by Common Dreams.
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Don’t purchase anything that records data.
Get an Alexa for every room of your house!! /s
Here’s the thing— by the time you’re reading about something that has an element of revelation in it, well, it’s likely already been going on for a decade or more. Take for instance the harnessing of wi-fi signals to paint an interior picture of the floors and rooms of a household or building, kind of like what you may have seen in this movie from almost 15 years ago:
You’ve already been mapped out, scanned, and monitored for quite some time.
As General David Patreaus, the CIA Director at the time said over a decade ago, “We’ll spy on you through [your appliances]”
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
Better yet, do not buy anything that connects to the internet by wifi. FIFY
Is this how it works?
=====
Rumba: “Calling FBI headquarters! Emergency! Emergency!!!”
FBI: “We’re here, Rummy. We always are. Watchya got?”
Rumba: “Glock-N-Load yesterday re-arranged his furniture!!”
FBI: “Tell us more, Tell us more. Did he seem to have fun? Tell us more, Tell us more. Like does he have a gun?
Rumba: “Well, I can tell you this. He moved the couch and other heavy furniture directly in front of the door! Also, he bought 82 cans of Spam this week!”
FBI: “Holy Shit … he does have guns and he’s preparing for a siege!! We’ll be there in two hours and take him down!”
Rumba: “If you want, I can short circuit myself and set his house on fire …..”
The IoT (internet of things) will be complete when Alexa says to Roomba: “You missed a spot.”
If you are wise, you would have moved out by then.
Anyone who has a “Smart home” is a moron. Anyone who has a robotic vacuum cleaner is a lazy bastard. But this is America, so combining the two is the obvious way forward. Top that with take out food delivered by Grubhub and groceries delivered by Instacart and it shows how fucked Americans are.
Positive side is that those fatty zombies die much sooner than biology would dictate.
You missed smart meters… Those that use the data nefariously, like google, microcrap etc and criminals, can tell when you get up, use your razor, shower, and leave for work. Criminals love it because they can determine when you are absent from your home regularly, break in and take their time ransacking your home. In fact, you may not even know they’ve been there until you go to fetch some expensive jewelry…. and its gone…
Remember when they bought Ring? They have been serving their FBI/CIA masters for quite some time time image and info gathering.
Should Amaz’n registered Roombas, gifted by anonymous admirers, have unforeseeable battery fires at 3AM after sneaking under the beds of alt-media truth tellers and prominent resistance leaders, well that’s just something that doesn’t happen in our dystopian new normal.
The idiot children known as the public love toys. Toys that let them be even lazier are loved more.
People who buy this crap have zero ability to consider the ramifications. What the advertising claims is all the information they care about regarding a product. Any information that suggests their toy is dangerous or harmful will be avoided and ignored so they can enjoy their toy without concern or thought.
I really look forward to the grid and internet going down. The people with these toys will be so seriously fucked, being unable to preform the simplest tasks without the IoT. Watching them starve/freeze/thirst to death mired in their own filth is going to be some epic schadenfreude.
My wife was interested in a Roomba, but they don’t make any without the capability of spying on you. It is something we don’t need anyways.
.
Honey? Why’s the Rumba always parked under our bed?
Jeff Bezos also is buying medical providers. So along with Amazon Web Service that supplies CIA/MIL/DHS with data centers, all this info is available for total awareness of our lives.
Amazon buys US medical provider as it cements move into healthcare
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/21/amazon-buys-medical-provider-one-medical
Does this mean they will ‘Get the dirt’ on all of us???
I think that once Bezos has detailed info about people’s homes, he’s going to sneak in and murder people, becoming a prolific serial killer. It’s just like that movie where Robin Williams worked at Fotomat and snooped on people’s pictures after they were developed. After he knew the layout of their houses, the murders were easy-peasy. I can totally see Bezos doing that.