I mean, this has been known about for petty much all smart vacuums.
But who the fuck is going to use the layout of your house for anything?
Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House
Submitted 3 weeks ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/robot-vacuum-broadcasting
Comments
Nightsoul@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
n0respect@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The secret police
Soktopraegaeawayok@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I feel the same way, I dont care really care about them knowing my house layout, but they shouldn’t. We cant let companies get away with infringing on our freedoms and privacy.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I’ve been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they’re basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the “go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock” or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.
Meanwhile, some guy’s got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.
I guess I’m willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that’s more practical to do on the company’s servers than on the device itself…except not really; we’ve got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don’t cost much, don’t take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can’t get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn’t broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
It’s funny how these “smart” appliances are all addressing things radically important for households, but in a poisoned way from the beginning. As if those making them were just trying to get there first and win the bank.
There’s a problem of scale in industrial innovations, where bigger scale makes cost of production of something and cost for the consumer and network effect power better, meaning that there’s no market feedback to help those who came first get old and die to make space for those who come next.
I think this tendency is actually the solution - there is a feedback, it’s that lacking feedbacks on one level prohibits those undying monsters from being competitive on the next one. The niche of non-poisoned smart appliances won’t be filled by anything big, for example.
That’s also another funny moment - instead of dedicated appliances it makes it useful to have one universal one (basically a butler robot) that can be programmed. It’s an incentive in the direction of universal machines programmed by customers.
BTW, imagine a frame with various manipulators and sensors attached to an RPi via GPIO, where every manipulator/sensor can be whatever thing at all, just needs to have a manipulator/sensor description template. The OS of the RPi itself runs tasks of the “move those items of fragility categories such and such to such and such locations, remove dust and dirt from that surface, wash that window”, for which the existing set of manipulators/sensors and task sequence are optimized without user’s involvement (other than attaching them and providing the right description templates, though I suppose manipulator controllers can provide them too, and confirming the resulting jobs). That’s also where those LLMs etc are good enough, to interpret instructions and display the sequence of actions they are going to perform to get user’s confirmation. This way you won’t have to fear that you tell it something harmless and it starts a fire in the room.
Such a system needs a set of standard protocols for the sensors\manipulators, their description templates, and the representation of commands deciphered from human speech to a set of tasks, and the spaces and traits of objects. The programs visualizing the resulting offered set of tasks, deciphering the order, optimizing one set of tasks into a better one, and so on, should be pluggable. Suppose everything’s already made, just nobody really needs a thing that they can’t just buy and turn on.
OK, I like imagining, should work better instead and start my toy the weekends after the next ones (I suspect I won’t start it even by then, at least not in the initial ideologically good form ; nothing about robotics or home appliances). Spent these weekends on making a POV-Ray scene instead.
Why did I even write this.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
ahh actions which would be considered “hackers stealing your personal info” twenty years ago is now something people (including me) pay money to be subjected to.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
BDSM is a thing
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
these “smart” appliances are all addressing things radically important for households
Are they, though?
Most of these “smart” functions are at best a slight convenience. And a lot of the “smart” functions in most of them don’t really add anything useful to the user experience.
DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Sure, if your physically able to do it all that is.
Things like these are important to disabled folks.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Yes, they are, it’s very convenient to have the same thing boil the water and make tea for you, or do the laundry and dry it, or do the floor and the windows when you can be busy with something else, same with cooking. Especially remote-controlled when you are an hour away. And it’s not a slight convenience, it’s life-changing like remote work.
bytesonbike@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
I bought a $300 fake Roomba thing. It was on clearance.
And i fought against it for years. But ended it up coming in clutch for a lot of reasons.
It did not have an app, just a IR controller. Its pretty dumb. It bumps into everything. It gets stuck under things. I sometimes have to create a maze so it cleans a specific spot.
Its been a habit of mines to avoid anything with an app that requires internet access. But the product lines are shrinking, and I know at some point, if I want a Roomba, I’ll need to invite always-on AI or whatever.
Joelk111@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You can have the best of both worlds. There’s a lot of smart home stuff that isn’t owned by a corporation. For vacuums, Valetudo is amazing and fun to set up, if not a little nerve wracking risking bricking your expensive appliance.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There’s some models that work with Matter and a local home server. There’s also a couple you can flash with open source software to keep it all local.
ChapulinColorado@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For those interested, there are some vacuum models listed on this project: valetudo.cloud
It can get technical (wince they want people to learn), but the documentation is pretty detailed.
Datahunter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Every gadget spies on you if you think about it.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Couldn’t someone just google the photos the realtor took and then compile a map? 🤔
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
I don’t understand why these devices need an internet connection?
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
To upload a map of your home duh
betanumerus@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Some of these connect to a smartphone App through Wi-Fi.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
We need bluetooth devices back, there’s no reason for 99.999999% of devices to have your network password.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Because people are not taught the basics off Lan network va Wan network.
During the aws outage i heard multiple people be upset with their isp because “the wifi is broken”
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
I worked in tech support for several years last decade… and the amount of people who tell me ‘my Facebook isn’t working’ to mean their internet connection is bust is insane. And they aren’t getting any smarter. Last time I worked tech support was in 2021 and I got fired when I nearly lost my shit with an American client who demanded to know why he couldn’t enter a company store without a mask.