Clear All Rooms—And Homes—Of Roombas

I've never had a Roomba, never trusted them, and here are more reasons to never get one.

"Testers for the popular Roomba automated vacuum cleaner made by iRobot have stated that they feel misled after intimate photos of them ended up on Facebook.”

"Amazon is in the process of acquiring iRobot, driven by an insatiable lust to hoover up every last shred of its customers’ data."

"An investigation by the MIT Technology Review revealed that gig workers in Venezuela were asked to label items in photographs of home interiors taken by the Roomba vacuum, some of which included people with visible faces. The employees subsequently posted at least 15 images to social media groups, including pictures of a child and a woman using the restroom. It is thought that this is not an isolated incident and that labelers frequently receive access to private photos, videos, and audio."

“iRobot terminated its agreement with one of the data annotation businesses it was working with, Scale AI, in response to the investigation. However, iRobot CEO Colin Angle stated in a LinkedIn post that making such images available was necessary for training the company’s object recognition algorithms, denying the concern that human gig workers could see test users’ images and faces.”

Roomba Testers Feel Misled After Intimate Pictures Are Posted to Facebook by Foreign Gig Workers