> I'm fairly dubious that there's any useful data here.
Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income, which usually is a superset of what you could spend in online purchases. Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes. I expect some more room for Roomba competitors here; certainly I wouldn't want a Amazon branded one even for free.
>Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income
okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
>Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes.
You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has.
"okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?"
- I've never found that ignoring one leak because there's another fixes the pipe.
"You're not going to be able to detect much objects with a tiny camera situated on the ground. At best you can figure out what appliances each house has."
- 20 years ago who would've thought that TV's would all be capturing your life on record. At best they can check what channel you're watching.
The concerns seem quite plausible: means, motive, and opportunity.
I think the metaphor here is that "sqft of house is visible" is less a pipe and more of a river?
Random ways I can think of to harvest sqft of your house:
1. Satellite
2. MLS records and/or building plans
3. Don't amazon drivers drive past like every single house at least once a day at this point? could probably do something with that.
Plus, I would be shocked if "amount you spend on amazon per month" doesn't nearly linearly correlate with your income, if that's what they want. Plus doesn't equifax et al literally sell these datasets for this explicit purpose?
I agree in principle that in general I do not want amazon to have an internet-connected LIDAR thingy mucking about my house, but also I struggle to figure out what specific privacy delta is happening here that would be a watershed moment.
TBH still kind of reeling that most TVs have microphones on them with no clearly policy that they're not always listening (vs phones get a lot more scrutiny) and things to that effect. If I were going to try to improve my privacy, moving to a dumb TV is probably something I'd do well before I got rid of my amazon-roomba.
Agreed regarding the fact that this is, at the moment, not the biggest privacy concern.
Of course, I also believe it should be packaged along with the other concerns, because I would argue that each of these capabilities can be called in security terms:
The cable operators have been knowing exactly what channel you are watching for longer than 20 years ago. Think back to how long ago you switched your old analog cable box for a fancy digital one. That's how long. If you're not old enough to know about analog cable boxes, then it has always been true for you.
TVs just introduced the potential for a camera/microphone and the manufacturer receiving that info directly instead of just the cable co.
>okay but can't they get that from your address and correlating that with satellite images and/or zip code data?
That tells someone that you can afford to live in that zip code, but it doesn't tell them what you can afford to put in your home. Smart home devices, theoretically, "solve" that "problem".
At least where I live, I can go to an official government website and see exactly what someone’s home is valued at and how much they pay in property taxes just by searching their name and address.
You can get it directly off the MLS in many (US) states. Of course, a staged home may not provide the same quality of data that a view inside a lived-in house would, and if your home hasn't gone up for sale in a long time it may not have anything relevant to say. But the gaps in that dataset feel far smaller than the "I don't own a roomba" gap in this dataset.
Your home layout and size speaks about how much is your income, which usually is a superset of what you could spend in online purchases. Also, should they stick a camera or a very advanced lidar in front of the Roomba, they could build a database of what items their customers have -and don't have- (read: could be pushed to purchase through targeted advertising) in their homes. I expect some more room for Roomba competitors here; certainly I wouldn't want a Amazon branded one even for free.