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Comment by pyvpx | Hacker News Reader

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There's plenty of competition in this space, and there's no need to be snarky.

my snark compensates for the absolute lack of depth of thought in your position. nothing personal — I am simply incredulous at your stance in the face of well…how data and capitalism works, historically.

> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily? you cant? damn. you might wanna do some creativity exercises instead of crapping on your keyboard for everyone to see. embarrassing for you. truly.

Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba. Why do you always assume that people are rubes who are being duped by corporations, as opposed to people who are making a conscious tradeoff?

> Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba.

How many people have bought Roombas without knowing they would be sold to Amazon in the future? A quick search came up with 40 million units sold so far. Will Amazon offer a full refund to every person who doesn't want their data with Amazon? Or will they offer the option to completely stay off of Amazons systems, keeping the existing Roomba systems running?

If not, do you expect people to somehow accurately predict the future when making purchasing decisions?

I don't think people can predict what will happen to the products they buy in the future. But I do think people can choose to use or not use the products they buy based on new information. And my point is not that this is a good or bad thing (for the record I think it's bad but so is the company going out of business), just that more often than not the loudest consumer advocates seem to have incredibly dim views of consumers themselves. It must be the case that consumers don't know or don't understand the tradeoffs they are making, rather than that consumers simply place a lower value on "privacy".

Is you having the option to choose lower privacy worth 40 million people having lower privacy? That seems to be the dichotomy here - consumer advocates don't just care about new buyers.

> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily?

Well of course, but the EU already has plenty of privacy laws to deal with that. That's no reason for the EU to object to this acquisition on those grounds.

It seems the primary issue here is that Amazon might be incentivized to disadvantage competing robo-vacuums on their marketplace. Which is not an unfair observation, but a bit strange given how many other Amazon-brand products it is already selling.

Seriously horrifying. If the acquisition went through, Amazon would know exactly what was going on outside AND inside your house since they also own Ring.

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