It is no news at all that data are important and that we are flooded by data. Actually, it is exactly because it is no news that the ever increasing sources of data fall below our perception and that is a problem. Take something like a vacuum cleaner. The Roomba, manufactured by iRobot.
To do its job it keeps harvesting data about your house, so that it can optimise its cleaning paths, avoid bumping in objets and so on. Well, all these data can be leveraged to know something about your house. The information on how much “empty space” you have in your living room, the fact that there would be space for an additional couch or that your couch is getting old and starts to wear out can trigger a targeted ads from Amazon to propose you exactly that, may be providing you with a proposal for changing the arrangement of your furniture.
Roomba is equipped with sensors and with an on board AI software that “understand” the lay of the land, so to say. Notice that one of this sensor is a digital camera and the AI software recognises the object it is seeing, like a couch and a chair. This allows Roomba to create a map of your home and you can see that map, and the cleaning progress, on your smart phone.
Actually, the map shown on your phone is a “summary” of the data gathered by Roomba, which are quite more extensive.
iRobot has been thinking about the value of the data its Roomba cleaners keep harvesting and has thought about selling them. At least, this is what they announced in an interview of its CEO Colin Angle gave to Reuter. Given the image recognition capability and the photo capturing an application in the cloud would be able to tell what furniture model you have. Additionally, since these data are continuously updated this application can also detect when you change something, add something, even move something around.
As one could have expected this statement raised quite some concerns and now iRobot is backtracking ensuring its customers it will never sell their data. As you know, never say never…
On the other hand it is obvious that releasing these data might result in an increased service to you. This robot is actually digitising your home, creating a digital twin that you can use when shopping around or when in need for maintenance. You will have a model of your home in your smartphone, constantly updated, you might even use it to look for that Lego brick that has gone missing and thanks to Roomba it could be spotted under the couch.
As with every technology, the implications are always varied, the coin has always two sides. The one used by marketing where all is nice and great, and the one you are never told that may present some downside. Deciding out big these are for you it is of course for you … to decide. The problem is that most of the time we are not aware of these downside.
I, for one, would have never considered I would have to watch out for my vacuum cleaner!