Do you ever wonder if the smart home is getting too smart? Or that the facts that the Internet of Things knows about you could be used against you
Do you ever wonder if the smart home is getting too smart? Or that the facts that the Internet of Things knows about you could be used against you? O, brave new world.
Reuters has reported that iRobot, makers of the popular robot vacuum cleaner Roomba, has been collecting data as well as dust.
Of course, for a robot vacuum cleaner to do its job well, it needs to know the way your home is laid out. It does this, in Roomba’s case, by building up a map of your living room, say, understanding that there’s a couch over there, a low table here and so on.
The company feels that there’s much benefit to be gained from using this information. Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot Corp, says “There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared.”
You’ll have spotted the most important word in that sentence, of course, was “allowed”. After all, the visual information and that derived from sensors such as lasers and infra-red receivers is intensely personal – it’s your living room, kitchen or even bedroom that we’re talking about. Privacy concerns are likely to be uppermost in many consumers’ minds.
Angle says he thinks most would be agreeable to give their consent in return for being able to have access to smart home functions.
The full scope of how to use this data is still to be explored but at the very least it could mean that a sound system could reconfigure itself when it received information that a room layout had been altered. Or smart lights could behave differently at different times of day, once it was clear where the windows in the room were.
Though if you ask me, that sounds like a highly annoying option if I’m sitting quietly reading a book, say.
Angle suggested that he could be selling maps to Amazon, Google or Apple in the future – it’s claimed that the right to sell this information is already included in the company’s terms of service.
Beyond these developments, a third-party company could suggest home goods that a customer might like to buy.
Like a vacuum cleaner that keeps its mouth shut and minds its own business, perhaps.
forbes.com
