MY NAME IS VACCUM…..ROBOT VACUUM

One of the biggest fears in our modern societies is to be spied on by our own devices.

We naturally first think about our SmartPhones or our Alexas or Google home.

But what about having a spy in the most innocent devices in our home….a robot automatic vacuum for example.

This is exactly the nightmare that lived a woman in when a pic of herself sitting on the toilet leaked on a facebook group.

This pic, in very poor quality, is part of a batch of fifteen others that have been found in the same page.

All these shots have in common that they were captured at ground level.

The responsible of this leak is Agent 007 Roomba J7 vacuum robot from iRobot, the largest supplier of this type of device.

The main question is how did these photos taken by vacuum cleaners end up on social networks, no matter how private they are? And first, why do these vacuum cleaners take pictures?

As with the vast majority of so-called smart accessories, the manufacturer comes to collect a lot of data.

They are used to feed the machine learning algorithm of Artificial Intelligence. It is what improves the services and capabilities of the device.

In the case of a robot vacuum cleaner, the sensors are numerous and there are even smart cameras embedded on the Roomba J7. The robot can send images, voices, faces, geolocations, home maps and a whole bunch of other personal information.

This has only one purpose: to train algorithms. Generally, this collection is specified in the privacy policy that no one takes the time to read. You know the ones Written in so little characters…

All that sensitive data originated from home networks in North America, Europe and Asia and was stored on iRobot's servers in Massachusetts, USA.

But, some of that data was sent to a San Francisco contractor called Scale AI. Its mission is to have humans analyze the data to give them description labels.

This is, according to the brand, the only way to teach the AI to recognize its environment.

However, in the face of mountains of data, it turns out that Scale AI uses subcontractors around the world. Among them, South American workers, under contract, published these photos of private groups on social networks such as Facebook, or Discord.

The leak does not come from a security breach at all, but from a weak link in the brand's subcontracting chain.

The problem is that iRobot has shared with its contractors more than two million shots taken by the Roomba.

iRobot explained that the brand had ended its collaboration with the company whose employees had leaked the images.

Still, the intervention of humans is the only possibility to be able to improve AI. So we can understand that this issue can happen again in the future.

Skynet here we are…..