Me. And not to put too fine a point on it, the people in the market for buying and selling this data.
> Why should I be worried if Amazon knows the distance between my couch and coffee table?
I'm not going to presume to speak for you.
> Isn't our outrage better preserved for when our privacy is truly invaded?
...So don't speak for me when deciding what is an isn't an invasion of privacy.
I find this to be a significant invasion, and so do many other folks, some of whom are giving you possible answers to your question. In a lot of ways, this is no different than people claiming the FB 'true name' policy doesn't matter/is actually a positive. Maybe for them, but not for the former partner of an abusive spouse, or the gay kid in Russia or Alabama.
Don't presume that your tolerance for data leakage is the same as everyone else's.
More generally, the point is that information like this just should be default-private. There is zero reason for me to want information like this to be shared with random third-parties. If iRobot or whomever wants to "enhance the value of their connected devices" with private data about me and/or my possessions, let them approach me and convince me to share it, not just blandly write some bullshit privacy policy and take it from a device I purchased.
I love innovation, new toys, etc. But this rush to sneakily inventory/quantify/spy on me, my home, possessions and relations is awful, and will have creepy outcomes. It won't happen to me, because I won't install this shit in my home or use social media, but it will happen.
Do what you like with your own sense of privacy, but don't presume to speak for anyone else about what a "true invasion" might be.
This is exactly what I am talking about. Do you honestly see no hyperbole in this? Roomba having a map of my floors is no different than a policy that leads to gay kids in Russia being thrown in jail. Things aren't binary. We can deal with them in nuance. Equating these two together weakens your argument against both of them.
yourapostasy's post elsewhere in the thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14876581 ) is worth considering before dismissing these concerns as "hyperbole."
When it comes to Big Data -- and Big Metadata, for that matter -- quantity has a quality all its own. If this type of data weren't valuable, and hence worth safeguarding, there would be no market for it.
When iRobot releases their commercial automatic floor cleaning robot, consider your restricted floor-plans as mapped.
Even today, there's a market eerily similar to the market of videos from hijacked xbox cameras in order to show room contents.
There are lots of other markets I can think of off the top of my head. Don't discount what data can reveal.
I'd like to agree with you, but I'm becoming less sure of that with every day.
For instance, you breezed right past my point (that privacy risks are different for different people) to hammer more on your presumptuous assertion that floor maps don't (or maybe you mean shouldn't) matter to anyone.
However, in this case, I still cannot understand all the negativity still being directed toward iRobot. We know data they're collecting, we know why they're collecting it, and uploading mapping data is opt-in. If any of these things concerns you, can you just not buy it and move on?
More seriously, I see value in iRobot and others hearing loud noise about how stuff like this is not OK to many of us.
- "We" may know this, but I doubt there's a "we also sell your data" sticker on the box, and lots of other people don't.
- If people don't push back, manufacturers will hear that this is acceptable. I'd like this to not be acceptable.
- iRobot may have floated this in order to find out what people thought, but many other companies are much less scrupulous. They need to hear loud and clear that this is not acceptable.
- If loud outcries happen each time some company tries to normalize data grabs like this, they won't be normalized. That's a world I'd like to live in, so I'll keep being loud, thanks.
Full disclosure: I am a former iRobot engineer, and also a big privacy proponent. I also had some feelings about a camera enabled mapping robot when I first learned about the project, but I can tell you that the people there take privacy and data security VERY seriously, and really are trying to respect their customers as much as possible. Unfortunatley the message that iRobot wanted to allow you to share your mapping data if you wanted to for enabling smart home applications got spun pretty quickly into "iRobot wants to sell your data!")
I hate to sound alarmist, but as our world grows increasingly connected, I tend to be a bit cautious as to why I'm giving up this data and for what benefit. I see stories like this (https://carpeaqua.com/2017/07/07/hack-the-planet/) and wouldn't have thought before that my PayPal accounts or other financial information could be at risk because of an AT&T issue, but some criminal was smart and exploited the weak link here.
I don't have any idea as to how criminals in the future will exploit my personal house data in order to steal from me, but just in case they find a way, I'd rather not offer up that data because "who cares".
Floor plans are quite useful for staging a burglary.
And maybe you live in a much bigger place than I do, but a burglar isn't going to be planning to rob me like they are planning to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. My house isn't that complicated, you don't need to spend much time planning when you can deduce a floor plan pretty quickly. It also isn't like a Roomba created floor plan would have any idea on where in my house the valuables are stored.
If we just sat quietly and did nothing when iRobot seems to be selling our data, then that just opens the door to worse privacy violations.
If I'm a burglar, it's convenient to map out your house before I burgle you.
There's just no reason pertaining to cleaning floors that the floor plan needs to get saved anywhere. Companies collect data for the purpose of extracting value from it. If they just wanted to make smart devices better, they could have the devices communicate on a closed network without sending data anywhere outside the network.
This isn't thinking like a corporation, nor a hacker. This as an APT, information security-wise.
These kinds of grants of access to private data by consumers for monetization purposes are never, ever constrained to one highly-specific type of data. They want you to grant access to a data gathering CHANNEL. Once that channel is opened, any additional data they figure out how to gather falls under the same agreement you consented to before.
Today, it is room data. Tomorrow, it is dust and pollen collection data.
"So what, who cares, they can have measurements of how much dust and pollen is in my home, lol."
Yeah?
Exactly how much have you worked with the data brokering business? If you've been around the block in that part of the industry for any length of time, you quickly realize that it isn't single individual databases where the real bucks are made. It is novel combinations of datasets giving you a plausible explanation to draw inferences from the data.
Go back to the hypothetical dust and pollen measurement. Suppose the GOP loosens the restrictions on risk-pricing medical insurance plans; as long as an insurer can point to a plausible explanation of pricing factors, they can price it however they want above a baseline, but they don't have to make it easy for you to figure that out. Health insurer uses a study [1] to explain how certain levels of dust and pollen are correlated to X% increases in stress-related costs. They purchase the dataset from iRobot. Slap an X% increase onto your premiums, but you are none the wiser on exactly why, and especially where the substantiating data came from, "because it's a trade secret".
The practically non-existent privacy protections for American consumers is essentially a license to steal from them. The best part is you never have to be told who gave what information about you, and when. All this data gathering started out as a sales exercise only because that is the low-hanging fruit. The real prize is absolute control over all the decisions you will make that matter to the owners.
You could call me paranoid, but I prefer all data I generate in private to be limited to whom I want to share it with.
Sure, there'll be periodic and pointless indignation, but then the vast majority of those complaining will go back to trading their personal information for free stuff.
The only reason I can think of is that square footage can be an indicator of income class.