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It's worth noting here (to those who are writing about unauthorized uploading of images) that those were testers. The Roomba they got was there explicitly to ga
by cube2222 4y ago
It's worth noting here (to those who are writing about unauthorized uploading of images) that those were testers. The Roomba they got was there explicitly to gather images to be used for development purposes. It's obviously still not OK that those images leaked publicly, but it's not like it was spying on them without their consent.
Having bought the Roomba J(+) recently, the contribution of images for testing purposes is opt-in so done properly in that sense. The camera is also completely covered when the Roomba is docked, while the advantage of recognizing obstacles and properly driving around them is great. My previous Roomba was completely useless because it would get stuck on cables, shoes, anything.
All this to say it's not that black-and-white to me. I still don't do explicit stuff in front of the Roomba, but it doesn't mean I can't use it in a controlled way.
- dboreham 4y ago> but it's not like it was spying on them without their consent Actually that's exactly what they did because the "their" here encompasses all humans in the building. Unless there was a requirement to post prominent notices "you will be subject to filming if you enter this facility" around the place, then no there wasn't consent.
- cube2222 4y agoDon't you think that's on the testers who agreed to test that Roomba and set it up in their building?
- robin_reala 4y agoNot really. At least in the EU “consent” on its own doesn’t exist, the concept is “informed consent”. So Roomba, if relying on consent, should have informed the user of the need to get informed consent from every non-child family member and visitor that might come into contact with that Roomba and to transmit that informed consent to Roomba. (Children’s consent can be given by their guardians.)
- gspencley 4y agoIt's black and white to me in the sense that I don't like the idea of something that I buy to clean my carpets having a NIC inside of it. Even if I don't opt-in to enabling certain features, I'm not comfortable paying for the hardware and having a device in my home that is even capable of sending data about my private living space to some remote server. It reminds me of that time a bought a dust collector called a "Playstation 4" and it required me to connect it to the Internet before I could use it. I almost returned it for that very reason. Not everything needs to be connected to a network.
- mzs 4y agoThe images weren't supposed to be leaked publicly. No one agreed to that.