> Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked,
The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
If it has no camera and no microphone, the worst case leak is way better than what iRobot has already been caught doing:
(The toilette videos) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Given that I use roughly the same number of cloud and government services as other people, and live in a city, to me this is privacy. Without cameras or microphones it falls within my tolerance for information that third parties know about me given the risk of those third parties abusing that data (either directly or via hackers).
Sorry to break the bad news to you but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.
I'm not living in anger, I'm just not comfy sharing my data with Chinese companies and their random cloud services. I think that applies to most people actually.
Yes the ship has long sailed on the online privacy of the Average Joe who's already knees deep in Google, Meta, Tinder, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, but that doesn't mean I should just bend over to more of those from China as well.
Privacy is not binary, as in you either have it or you don't, but you can actively control and limit how much you give away once you're educated on the subject and willing to invest a few clicks through cookie banners, ad blockers, etc.
You're probably not an Uighur.