Amazon Got Access to the Interior of Your Home Without You Even Noticing

Aug 10, 2022

Amazon acquired iRobot, the company that makes Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, for $1.7B. It can now have richer data about the interior of your home and share it with whoever they see fit, even the police. You never consented to it (but it is probably buried somewhere in their privacy policy).

Amazon is also the owner of:

Ring: so that it can have video from your home;

Alexa: so that it can have audio from your home;

Numerous smart home devices: so that they can have detailed and integrated data from your routine and your needs.

Amazon even has another smart vacuum called Astro, but it's more expensive, so fewer people have bought it. They needed MORE DATA, and iRobot offers access to the interior of 30 million homes.

> Examples of privacy implications of this acquisition:

By the content of your floor crumbs, Amazon can know that you prefer potato chips instead of crispy bread and manipulate specific promotions to make potato chips slightly more expensive, as it knows you'll buy anyway.
It can cross the data from iRobot with data from other smart devices you own and create detailed profiling of your buying habits and daily behavior. It knows you so well that it can design the perfect message to send you in order to manipulate you to buy something.
Even without your consent (sometimes without a warrant), Amazon can give the data about your home to the police, as it has done in the past.

"Datapolies" (monopolies of data) are being formed in front of us and getting bigger and bigger by the day. Do you think privacy is dead? Or that privacy is not relevant to you? Think again. These are the business models of the future, and they are already here. Do not be fooled by the concealing enthusiasm behind new tech tools: these are simply big companies wanting to profit from your data.

-

See you next week. All the best, Luiza Jarovsky