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I read the article and I don’t think your interpretation of the “suggested” narrative is there. The title is “ A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did
by gretch 4y ago
I read the article and I don’t think your interpretation of the “suggested” narrative is there. The title is “ A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?”. That’s not really implying a “they’re watching you narrative” - who’s “they” and if it’s global syndicate why did they do something as innocuous as putting it on Facebook?
But yes, the real story is that training data (and “real” data) does leak all the time and that most companies don’t take insider risk as seriously as they should.
- karmakaze 4y agoThe part that's missing is that it isn't just "a Roomba", it's "a Roomba labelled with “video recording in progress”". Saying 'a Roomba' implies that it could've been done from any Roomba.
- gretch 4y agoThe article addresses this head on. Even though those users once consented to share data “It’s not expected that human beings are going to be reviewing the raw footage.” The meat of the article is that what technology and tech companies are doing is divorced from the expectations that we have as a society. It couldn’t have been done from any roomba, but it could happen to almost everyone who didn’t understand the exact ramifications (which we click through several of every year to try to get the vacuum up and running). That’s why a lot of ppl on HN put masking tape over their laptop webcam. Or are you calling those people paranoid?
- adamrezich 4y agohow did we get to the point where people have Internet-connected cameras and microphones everywhere in their houses yet implicitly trust that anything recorded will never under any circumstances be viewed by another human being
- waffleiron 4y agoI think the second part of your sentence is a least a partial answer to your first part.
- nullc 4y agoCouldn't it have been? after all they can remotely update the firmware. They just weren't in this case.
- smohare 4y ago
- twelve40 4y agoit's great that you personally are thorough enough to dig into the article and see for yourself - my favorite data set size of 1 and conclusions from that - but half the people even here, let alone outside of hn, will just grab the headline and run with it, saying "I heard roombas spy on people", and that's a problem. And the people who wrote this article know this full well.
- mikem170 4y agoWhat's the worst that happens, someone buys an older roomba without a camera, or gets some exercise using a vacuum? Is it a bad thing if people err on the side of being too private, for a change, instead of blindly trusting big tech tracking everything they do, or being completely uninformed about this sort of thing?
- sofixa 4y ago> "I heard roombas spy on people" Precisely how the "Zoom is Chinese spyware!" stuff spread around.