Comment on Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Am I too dumb to understand why sending cartographer data is wrong?
His model is iLife A11 that has Lidar. He probably has an app that is used to control robot and shows cleaning progression. Vac 100% Lidar’d his entire home and sent data to create map in the app.
How in the fuck he thinks it is getting that map? If his ass so smart to find a killswitch and reverse it, how come he doesn’t grasp that map data is sent to a server though which he ca use vac app? Like in what world is it not obvious?
Not even gonna discuss about TOS he signed, or that it is general cheap brand cheap but super smart model for it’s price.
Unless some FOSS firmware and software is installed, that thing most certainly will ping back home every chance it gets.
Sidenote: My TV now is offline cause when it kept calling home (ove 60% of my pi-holes querries of all time was TV), it would freeze due to pi-hole block. Once set offline - issue is gone. I also know my robo vac is pinging, but at the same time if I block it, I’ll lose app controls which I wont do. Sadly, my vac doesn’t support Valetudo.
Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think yes, to your first question. Couldn’t it just crunch the lidardata locally to feed into cartographer, I don’t understand why you don’t understand that this is the issue.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 1 day ago
afaik the lidar data is crunched locally, then sent to the remote server for easy consumption
when those vacuums are flashed with valetudo, they can still make the map with lidar without internet connection
Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Exactly. So it’s pure surreptitious data exfiltration. They only reason they send the data back is because they can, and there is value for them.