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iRobot might soon share maps of your home with other smart device manufacturers
STATES CHRONICLE – iRobot, the company well known for producing robot vacuum cleaners such as Roomba, are planning a new strategy which might not make all customers happy. It seems the company wants to engineer the robot to gather digital maps of your house, and then offer it to other companies.
In 1990, iRobot was well-known for producing robots which disposed bombs. Then, it switched to producing smart vacuum cleaners, with Roomba being the most popular item produced by the company.
Having a digital map of a home helps smart devices offer you more services
When it first appeared, it spiced a real craze all over the internet. Now, it no longer seems so popular, but you might want to redirect your attention towards it. It seems iRobot is planning to let Roomba provide other companies with maps of your home.
Colin Angle, the iRobot CEO, said that most smart home equipment was still not capable of creating a digital image of the layout of your home. However, if they knew exactly how everything was organized in your house, they could become more useful and offer you more services. Therefore, if users allowed to share a map of their house with them, everything would be perfect.
Some customers might not agree with having their data shared
What Roomba will do would be to collect information regarding this home organization. However, this data is useful if other smart devices get to access it, so iRobot declared it was planning to sell this information in the future. Amazon’s smart assistant Alexa is already connected to some vacuum robots, and Apple might make great use of this data as well.
This might sound useful, but the privacy issues are still there. iRobot declared it wouldn’t use any data without receiving the user’s consent, but didn’t give any other details on how this mechanism would work. Some users might not be happy with sharing this info with other companies, as they cannot be sure of how they might treat private data.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
