Smart Home

The Roomba maps your home via vacuum, and may be able to sell that data

4.3/5 - (48 votes)

Roomba maps your home: The maker of the Roomba, iRobot, wants to sell the data that the handy vacuum cleaner of your home has collected. The smart vacuum knows exactly what the layout of your home looks like, and that information can potentially improve future smart home products.

Roomba maps your home

In recent years, the smart vacuum cleaner Roomba has not only tidy up your home, it has also mapped your home. Now Colin Angle, the boss of Roomba manufacturer iRobot, wants to sell that information to third parties to make future smart home products better. The first model was launched in 2015 and uses different sensors to map your home. This is necessary because the vacuum cleaner then knows where it should be and, above all, where it should not be (because it cannot pass through somewhere, for example).

In an interview with Reuters news agency , Angle announced that it wanted to do more with that data. According to the best man, there is a complete ecosystem of things and services that a smart home can provide when there is a rich map of the house. Angle says data would not be sold without permission, but he does believe that the majority of users will agree to the terms. In the coming years, iRobot aims to strike deals with companies like Google, Apple and Amazon, all of which are doing something in the house of the future.

Amazon of course has Alexa and the Echo devices, while Google has the smart speaker Google Home with the Assistant on board (which will also come to other devices later) and Apple recently presented the HomePod , of course with Siri on board. Roomba owners have the option not to participate in this type of practice, which means their data would not be shared. However, iRobot’s terms and conditions and privacy policy state that the company has the right to sell your data. Whether you like it or not.

This is the text from those conditions:

We may share your personal information with] other parties in connection with any company transaction, such as a merger, sale of all or a portion of company assets or shares, reorganization, financing, change of control or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company or third party or in the event of bankruptcy or related or similar proceeding.

The question now is whether sharing this information can indeed improve future smart home products or is it simply a new way of getting people to buy things through personalized ads.