Trojan horse

I remember a couple of years ago a friend was telling me he couldn't wait until it was Black Friday, because he was coveting a robot vacuum for his apartment. “One with a camera and sensors to map the house and better clean it... and best of all, I can control it with an app from my phone”, I remember him talking about the features.

I have to say I've never understood quite well the thing about robot vacuum cleaners. They can wander your house and clean it while you're asleep, or putting the time you would need to be vacuuming your place to better use, alright, but still... that never convinced me, and personally I've never bought us one.

We live the Information Age, everyone knows, right? Every company everywhere is after our data, so they can profile us and increase their offers... and profit. So imagine if you found out your valuable robot vacuum cleaner was a spy... a Trojan horse, collecting your data all the time — pictures, voice conversations and videos, along with mapping your whole house — while it innocently cleans your house?

Well, according to this piece published at Slashdot, Chinese manufacturer Ecovacs has been doing exactly this with Australian customers who buy their popular Deebot vacuums. They ask if their customers want to take part in a product improvement program and those who consent are actually opening their privacy to the company, who can then train their AI models based on their private data. Ecovacs says their customers are willingly participating, but the thing is the company's privacy policy is quite obscure, allowing it to take pictures, videos and record conversations, as well as capturing 2D and 3D models of customers' houses, which, even if deleted by them at their phone's app, can still be used by Ecovacs, as the info is transferred to their servers.

This is... preposterous. Can you imagine what would happen if a list of customer addresses, their houses' floor plans and 3D maps, pictures and videos fell in the wrong hands? That'd be every burglar's dream!

And it reminds me of why I am the annoying person who actually reads the policies and terms of service. You never know what they're asking of you — and they could be asking you to assign them your first-born child.

You know, all in all, I'm happy not to be the owner of one of these robot vacuum cleaners. That's one less worry, and one less headache, after all. I'll just keep my normal vacuum cleaner and my piassava broom, which, by the way, has never given up any personal information of mine, or undisclosed any of our conversations...