6 ms·

I wonder if Amazon actually cares about cleaning robots, or if they're after the data roomba collects? https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/16055590/roomba-wont-s

I wonder if Amazon actually cares about cleaning robots, or if they're after the data roomba collects? https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/16055590/roomba-wont-sell-data-irobot https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/16055590/roomba-wont-sell...

agilob 4y ago
Schema of your property, number of people living there and times where no one is at home is definitely useful for amazon.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  And for burglars.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    I assume you're talking about the kind with a badge. Normal criminals don't get access to Amazon's info before entering a house.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it's only a matter of time until Amazon's data is leaked and sold on the black market. Correlate house layout, number of residents and their schedules, plus income bracket (from another source, possibly also from Amazon), and it's a blueprint for burglars looking for an easy score in an upper-middle class neighborhood.
      - darkwater 4y ago
        Your take reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
      - julianlam 4y ago
        Don't forget to filter out homes that didn't buy an alarm system off Amazon
      - ghaff 4y ago
        You don't need to go to the black market. You can look up the property at the county (or whatever) clerk's office or look at satellite imagery and get a pretty good approximation. A ton of things are public information to a greater or lesser degree whether you like it or not.
      - bthrn 4y ago
        People who rob upper-middle class homes are not going to do so because they have a house layout in advance. They're just going to rob the house. And anybody who goes to the lengths of buying Amazon data on the black market is not going to be interested in stealing people's laptops and jewelry.
        swores 4y ago
        I think that's a bit naïve, considering how common it is to see modern tech and basic/traditional crimes intersect - from ATM card cloning, to using Tor+cryptocurrencies for buying drugs, car key fob hacking, etc. Sure the people who currently buy data on the black market won't all start robbing houses, and the people currently robbing houses won't all start buying illegal data to help their burgling. But as long as the economics make sense (and it likely would - once someone has a bunch of useful data that they want to sell illegally, they'll lower the price until it is worth being bought by people), some burglars definitely will start adding more intelligence to their planning including using black market data leaks for picking houses to target and for how/when to rob them, what items to look for, etc. And potentially you also get other people for whom burglary wasn't a feasible option before, but combined with this new tool might be. Personally I'm not going to become a burglar for ethical reasons, but for the sake of a hypothetical let's pretend that I have no ethics whatsoever and think that stealing is a fantastic idea as long as I can avoid getting caught. I still wouldn't rob houses, because it would seem like quite a risky way of making money, and with each big risk taken there's a fair chance of not even finding anything particularly valuable once you've broken into a house. But if I could buy data leaks that I trusted which told me which houses to rob to find the best ROI items (high value, easy to carry, and maybe even located thanks to the camera of a robot vacuum), and also told me when people would be home and would be asleep.... well maybe my hypothetical no-ethics self would still find a better crime to commit, but it'd be a hell of a lot more tempting to become a burglar than without all that data! Do you really think there haven't already been crimes committed that involves basic dumb theft but where the targets were chosen based off a leaked list of car purchases, or jewellery shop customers, or...? And not just in the era of digital data theft, go back a thousand years and I'd assume there were some "crimes of opportunity" committed not on a whim but thanks to planning enabled only by the studying of information they shouldn't have been in possession of.
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  The schema of your property is already publicly available in home schematics records, and they already have your address to look up. I think Occam's Razor applies here. iRobot is a profitable smart home product maker, their revenue/profit has continuously grown, and their IP + talent will allow Amazon to expand into other smart home verticals.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    Yes it's possible to lookup the schematics but completely impractical at Amazon's scale.
    - delecti 4y ago
      If home schematics were actually a thing they cared about (and I'm skeptical of even that premise), then at Amazon's scale, they could make it easy to achieve at their scale.
      - toss1 4y ago
        It is a totally different proposition to go and often manually lookup and harvest building floorplan data from town/city archives than to passively collect the same data floorplan data generated by devices in their ordinary operation. The former is not scaleable in any reasonable way and every operation is an ADDITIONAL cost, whereas the latter is generated for the products' main purpose and you merely add some storage for the harvested data. Moreover, the generated data will be much more up-to-date (plenty of renovations or updates happen without building permits, legally or not).
  - dogleash 4y ago
    I think experience has shown us time and time again that the following forms are misapplications of Occam's Razor: - business decision X isn't (in part) motivated by the intention to exploit the incidental access to data a product class brings - data class Y seems worthless/redundant, they wouldn't make a business out of it
- bthrn 4y ago
  My robot vacuum sits docked away from me, on a separate floor, during the day. It runs at night time and I never see it. It's connected to its own IOT network. How would it know how many people live in my home and when I'm not there?
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Roomba uses cameras which don’t work at night. If you run it in the dark it gets stuck. At least the 960.
  - rasz 4y ago
    Shoes/slippers, number of toothbrushes, coats/jackets, beds. Yes, they do have cameras and call home. Opsec is hard.
- rasz 4y ago
  And now realize Chinese brands of cleaning robots have build in full detailed mapping (lidar/camera/ai), and do call home.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Not to mention the location of valuables, security cameras (other than Ring, as they can just turn those off), any security dogs or cats. How do you think Jeffrey Beesoz got so rich?
raverbashing 4y ago
Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation)
- SnaggyJoker 4y ago
  At this point a company is going to need to produce a "deceased cubicle human detection" robot for the few holdouts 40 years from now.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Warehouse automation is a completely different ballgame to consumer, though. If an Amazon warehouse can replace a $20,000/year human with a Kiva robot, they're happy to pay $10,000 for it. Consumers, on the other hand, would find $500 on the steep side for a robot vacuum, considering they'll also need a regular vacuum to cover the stairs and so on. Consumers' price sensitivity is why Roomba spent years with a plastic product navigating at random by bumping into things and relying more on a brush than a vacuum.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    I think your numbers are a bit off. The base Amazon warehouse worker is closer to 35-40k all in cost. And the $700-$900 roombas sell very well.
  - elcritch 4y ago
    I'd expect they'd pay even 2-3x that easily since a robot can work 24/7. The squishy humans need to pee, or worse go home.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  there's a loose correlation of concerns there, but "definitely"? More like "likely."
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation) This is almost equivalent to saying that Boeing cares about paper planes because they make airliners.
ChrisLomont 4y ago
Amazon probably cares most about getting all the robot making talent and capability they can for a wide range of robotic needs they have/will have.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Amazon Robotics has been actively poaching talent from iRobot already, but I think it's probably a little of everything: talent, data, and the bump they can give to iRobot sales.
- muttled 4y ago
  Roomba already makes bots that carry around pallets in a warehouse so your point makes sense.
isodev 4y ago
It's also possible that iRobot owns patents related to technology Amazon is planning to use. Besides brush/cleaning-related patents, iRobot owns the rights to several techniques used to map and zone a space.
kumarvvr 4y ago
I guess data is one part, but I see this as a smart home eco-system play, that integrates well into their Alexa thing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
InCityDreams 4y ago
Looking at the reviews for spare parts for my model i7, i hope amazon gets rid of the crap replacements, but equally lowers the extortionate prices on the official, various, eu website(s).
dr_spicy 4y ago
Apparently iRobot is going to Amazon Devices and not Amazon Robotics, but who knows if they'll silently transfer a lot of that knowledge/talent after the acquisition
joshl32532 4y ago
I would imagine they'd want to combine Amazon Astro (the home robot) and Roomba's cleaning tech. Create an all-in-one Alexa robot.

agilob 4y ago

Schema of your property, number of people living there and times where no one is at home is definitely useful for amazon.

jacquesm 4y ago
And for burglars.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  I assume you're talking about the kind with a badge. Normal criminals don't get access to Amazon's info before entering a house.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Maybe I'm just paranoid, but it's only a matter of time until Amazon's data is leaked and sold on the black market. Correlate house layout, number of residents and their schedules, plus income bracket (from another source, possibly also from Amazon), and it's a blueprint for burglars looking for an easy score in an upper-middle class neighborhood.
    - darkwater 4y ago
      Your take reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    - julianlam 4y ago
      Don't forget to filter out homes that didn't buy an alarm system off Amazon
    - ghaff 4y ago
      You don't need to go to the black market. You can look up the property at the county (or whatever) clerk's office or look at satellite imagery and get a pretty good approximation. A ton of things are public information to a greater or lesser degree whether you like it or not.
    - bthrn 4y ago
      People who rob upper-middle class homes are not going to do so because they have a house layout in advance. They're just going to rob the house. And anybody who goes to the lengths of buying Amazon data on the black market is not going to be interested in stealing people's laptops and jewelry.
      - swores 4y ago
        I think that's a bit naïve, considering how common it is to see modern tech and basic/traditional crimes intersect - from ATM card cloning, to using Tor+cryptocurrencies for buying drugs, car key fob hacking, etc. Sure the people who currently buy data on the black market won't all start robbing houses, and the people currently robbing houses won't all start buying illegal data to help their burgling. But as long as the economics make sense (and it likely would - once someone has a bunch of useful data that they want to sell illegally, they'll lower the price until it is worth being bought by people), some burglars definitely will start adding more intelligence to their planning including using black market data leaks for picking houses to target and for how/when to rob them, what items to look for, etc. And potentially you also get other people for whom burglary wasn't a feasible option before, but combined with this new tool might be. Personally I'm not going to become a burglar for ethical reasons, but for the sake of a hypothetical let's pretend that I have no ethics whatsoever and think that stealing is a fantastic idea as long as I can avoid getting caught. I still wouldn't rob houses, because it would seem like quite a risky way of making money, and with each big risk taken there's a fair chance of not even finding anything particularly valuable once you've broken into a house. But if I could buy data leaks that I trusted which told me which houses to rob to find the best ROI items (high value, easy to carry, and maybe even located thanks to the camera of a robot vacuum), and also told me when people would be home and would be asleep.... well maybe my hypothetical no-ethics self would still find a better crime to commit, but it'd be a hell of a lot more tempting to become a burglar than without all that data! Do you really think there haven't already been crimes committed that involves basic dumb theft but where the targets were chosen based off a leaked list of car purchases, or jewellery shop customers, or...? And not just in the era of digital data theft, go back a thousand years and I'd assume there were some "crimes of opportunity" committed not on a whim but thanks to planning enabled only by the studying of information they shouldn't have been in possession of.
KoftaBob 4y ago
The schema of your property is already publicly available in home schematics records, and they already have your address to look up. I think Occam's Razor applies here. iRobot is a profitable smart home product maker, their revenue/profit has continuously grown, and their IP + talent will allow Amazon to expand into other smart home verticals.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Yes it's possible to lookup the schematics but completely impractical at Amazon's scale.
  - delecti 4y ago
    If home schematics were actually a thing they cared about (and I'm skeptical of even that premise), then at Amazon's scale, they could make it easy to achieve at their scale.
    - toss1 4y ago
      It is a totally different proposition to go and often manually lookup and harvest building floorplan data from town/city archives than to passively collect the same data floorplan data generated by devices in their ordinary operation. The former is not scaleable in any reasonable way and every operation is an ADDITIONAL cost, whereas the latter is generated for the products' main purpose and you merely add some storage for the harvested data. Moreover, the generated data will be much more up-to-date (plenty of renovations or updates happen without building permits, legally or not).
- dogleash 4y ago
  I think experience has shown us time and time again that the following forms are misapplications of Occam's Razor: - business decision X isn't (in part) motivated by the intention to exploit the incidental access to data a product class brings - data class Y seems worthless/redundant, they wouldn't make a business out of it
bthrn 4y ago
My robot vacuum sits docked away from me, on a separate floor, during the day. It runs at night time and I never see it. It's connected to its own IOT network. How would it know how many people live in my home and when I'm not there?
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Roomba uses cameras which don’t work at night. If you run it in the dark it gets stuck. At least the 960.
- rasz 4y ago
  Shoes/slippers, number of toothbrushes, coats/jackets, beds. Yes, they do have cameras and call home. Opsec is hard.
rasz 4y ago
And now realize Chinese brands of cleaning robots have build in full detailed mapping (lidar/camera/ai), and do call home.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Not to mention the location of valuables, security cameras (other than Ring, as they can just turn those off), any security dogs or cats. How do you think Jeffrey Beesoz got so rich?

raverbashing 4y ago

Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation)

SnaggyJoker 4y ago
At this point a company is going to need to produce a "deceased cubicle human detection" robot for the few holdouts 40 years from now.
michaelt 4y ago
Warehouse automation is a completely different ballgame to consumer, though. If an Amazon warehouse can replace a $20,000/year human with a Kiva robot, they're happy to pay $10,000 for it. Consumers, on the other hand, would find $500 on the steep side for a robot vacuum, considering they'll also need a regular vacuum to cover the stairs and so on. Consumers' price sensitivity is why Roomba spent years with a plastic product navigating at random by bumping into things and relying more on a brush than a vacuum.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  I think your numbers are a bit off. The base Amazon warehouse worker is closer to 35-40k all in cost. And the $700-$900 roombas sell very well.
- elcritch 4y ago
  I'd expect they'd pay even 2-3x that easily since a robot can work 24/7. The squishy humans need to pee, or worse go home.
andrew_ 4y ago
there's a loose correlation of concerns there, but "definitely"? More like "likely."
ekianjo 4y ago
> Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation) This is almost equivalent to saying that Boeing cares about paper planes because they make airliners.

ChrisLomont 4y ago

Amazon probably cares most about getting all the robot making talent and capability they can for a wide range of robotic needs they have/will have.

bmitc 4y ago
Amazon Robotics has been actively poaching talent from iRobot already, but I think it's probably a little of everything: talent, data, and the bump they can give to iRobot sales.
muttled 4y ago
Roomba already makes bots that carry around pallets in a warehouse so your point makes sense.

isodev 4y ago

It's also possible that iRobot owns patents related to technology Amazon is planning to use. Besides brush/cleaning-related patents, iRobot owns the rights to several techniques used to map and zone a space.

kumarvvr 4y ago

I guess data is one part, but I see this as a smart home eco-system play, that integrates well into their Alexa thing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

InCityDreams 4y ago

Looking at the reviews for spare parts for my model i7, i hope amazon gets rid of the crap replacements, but equally lowers the extortionate prices on the official, various, eu website(s).

dr_spicy 4y ago

Apparently iRobot is going to Amazon Devices and not Amazon Robotics, but who knows if they'll silently transfer a lot of that knowledge/talent after the acquisition

joshl32532 4y ago

I would imagine they'd want to combine Amazon Astro (the home robot) and Roomba's cleaning tech. Create an all-in-one Alexa robot.