Comment by iSnow
12 hours ago
Ordinary users don't know. They bought a robo-vac, they do not necessarily know it comes with a microphone or camera.
I work in tech, I never thought about buying one, so I never looked into them. Still, I am surprised they come with microphones.
IoT, internet privacy, spyware, etc. have been repeatedly in the news ad nauseam since about 2000. If they don't know by now where have they been for the past quarter century?
The first and most obvious question an owner should ask "why does a vacuum cleaner need to talk with the internet?" It's hard to have sympathy for people who go out of their way to act dumb.
This is a failure of regulation, not personal responsibility. Consumers should not have to threat-model their vacuum cleaner. That should be on the manufacturer, and when they fail like this they should be punished severely.
You are correct that a sane government would protect their customers from being secretly surveilled by companies who will do whatever they want with their customer's most private data including selling it to others. Americans should also know that we don't have a government that protects consumers from products that harm them even when that harm is well known. It's unfortunate, but until that changes people do have to threat-model their internet connected devices, just like they have to threat-model their food, their children's toys, their cosmetics, their health supplements, their cookware, their clothing, and just about everything else we buy.
1 reply →
> Still, I am surprised they come with microphones.
Me too, what are they for?
well spying, probably.
But let's suppose you are designing RoboVac vers. 1.0 OS, 1.0 OS does not use microphone, but one of our smart fellows wrote a document suggesting that we might want to have RoboVac be voice controlled! Maybe we can roll that out by 1.4, with some simple commands!! Let's put a Microphone in so we can add that feature later.
Later on you get fired, and smart fellow who wrote document gets fired, and OS 1.4 rolls out with spy tech to mark common product names and send them back to Amazon with your location data.
RoboVac 2.2 is out now, still no voice control, and you wonder why whenever you go to buy all your favorite products online there is 10% inflation on prices although news suggests inflation should actually be decreasing for the next half year.