Amazon’s Acquisition of Roomba Creators ‘iRobot’ Sparks Home Privacy Concerns

Amazon just yesterday purchased a home cleaning robot specialist iRobot for $1.7 billion. Famous for its cleaning robot named ‘Roomba’, iRobot has sold over 30 million of them as per the data recorded in 2020. Selling robots in such large amounts has given iRobot access inside every other US home, thus they can easily find out data such as the size of your home, the kind of conversations you have and even the kind of furniture you use.

Being an eCommerce giant, whose primary source of income is selling, data is equivalent to gold for the company. Having acquired iRobot Amazon can get inside your home and extract data in all ways possible and then use the data to generate sales for its eCommerce sites.

Apart from its e-commerce business, Amazon has also been actively working in the home automation industry, launching world-famous products such as Alexa, a device that follows voice commands and does things such as turning on lights and ordering stuff off the internet.

Roomba is actively used in homes, Roomba has mapping sensors that allow it to map the size of your home, know the number of children’s bedrooms you have and even know when you change the setting of a particular room. Interested in both, e-commerce and home automation, it can be guessed that Amazon wants to use this data in order to increase both the amount and quality of home automation it already provides.

Increasing home automation is one thing, this will also allow Amazon to enhance its suggestions since it would know when you redecorate your home or when something in your home gets used up.

While this advanced level of recommendation might sound nice, if this turns out to be true, it will cost users their privacy. User data is collected and used throughout the tech world, but using personal information for better home automation and suggestions is something else.

Another factor that concerns users is the fact that Amazon has a reputation for sharing data with police departments and has been alleged of listening to user conversations, now having a floor plan of your home it may be able to guess what your daily life looks like.