Spy vacuum cleaners

Futurism talks about a Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House:

“My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry that I had never consented to share,” Narayanan wrote. “That’s when I made my first mistake: I decided to stop it.”

Then

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

Not only it spies on you but if you block it, it stops working turning you device into an expensive paper weight.

Narayan, in The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me gives more technical details on what he did.

In other news, Roomba robot vacuums could lose (almost) all features as iRobot faces imminent bankruptcy:

The US company iRobot has been struggling with financial problems for years.

(the previous vacuum robot is from a different brand)

This could be as soon as 1st December 2025. When you sell a device that requires a permanent connection it’s bound to fail, and devices are bound to be bricked… or severely limited, and your customers will be the biggest losers, but at that point you no longer care.