Sheeesh, his fucking mobile phone mapped and photographed his house long ago.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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These arricles are meant to be rage bait for the techno-illiterate. As you said, cell phones mapped your house long ago as well as your smart TV, or any appliance that requires an internet connection.
People traded in their privacy for convenience.
Both can be true. Probably shouldn't make a regular practice of numbing out to this sort of info with the platitude "Big deal, my phone and facebook already have my data anyway. Might as well give you my mother's maiden name."
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Do you have any source on this? I have never seen a similar article about phones sending a 3D map of your home to the manufacturer.
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That is why I have denied internet access for my robot vacuum cleaner. Xiaomi doesn't need to know the blueprint of my house, and if it can't connect to the internet, there's no need for firmware updates.
I'll start the thing by pressing the button at the top.
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He’s going to have a heart attack to find out that the floor plan to most houses are available online and have been for a long time.
Yeah, but without the correlation that this particular fella is living there. That vacuum might've been the missing link in someone's data collection.
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This article just screams rage-bait. Not that I am against making people aware of this kind of privacy invasion, but the authors did not bother to do any fact checking.
Firstly, they mention that the vacuum was "transmitting logs and telemetry that [the guy] had never consented to share". If you set up an app with the robot vacuum company, I'm pretty sure you'll get a rather long terms and services document that you just skip past, because who bothers reading that?
Secondly, the ADB part is rather weird. The person probably tried to install Valetudo on it? Otherwise, I have no clue what they tried to say with "reprinting the devices’ circuit boards". I doubt that this guy was able to reverse engineer an entire circuit board, but was surprised when seeing that ADB is enabled? This is what makes some devices rather straight forward to install custom firmware that block all the cloud shenanigans, so I'm not sure why they're painting this as a horrifying thing. Of course, you're broadcasting your map data to the manufacturer so that you can use their shitty app.
The part saying that it had full root access and a kill-switch is a bit worse, but still... It doesn't have to be like this. Shout-out to the people working on the Valetudo project. If you're interested in getting a privacy-friendly robot vacuum, have a look at their website. It requires some know-how, but once it's done, you know for sure you don't need to worry about a 3rd party spying on you.
I am assuming the individual described in the article is based in the US, but nevertheless, many countries do not allow spying, fraud and criminality as long as you have a TOS that says you are allowed to do so.
This is a very provincial manner of thinking and shows how deeply tolerance of corruption and criminality dominates the American mind.
Same with the kill switch, it is essentially a fraudulent scheme, a criminal activity.
Americans are conditioned to do a lot of things without thinking about it, but if they ever really stopped to consider it, they'd be outraged.
For instance, those heart-tugging ads for St Jude's Children's Hospital. It's a great thing they do, taking in cancer kids, and covering all the expenses, even housing and food. They show grateful parents crying, because their kids have a chance because of the charity of St Jude and the viewers, and viewers shed a tear and donate.
It never occurs to anyone that in almost every other country in the world, such a place wouldn't be necessary. Their cancer kids would simply be taken care of. No pomp about it, no commercials begging for donations, curing cancer kids is just business as usual.
But in America, your kid will just DIE unless you've got good health insurance (which is about to get a LOT more expensive), a lot of money, or hit the charity lottery.
But that never occurs to Americans watching that ad. They will dig into their pockets to send money to St Jude, before they will give money to a progressive candidate to change our health care system so it doesn't require tear-jerking marketing to operate.
It never occurs to anyone that in almost every other country in the world, such a place wouldn’t be necessary.
Yep. It reminds me of this .
Every heartwarming human interest story in America is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used.
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Am I too dumb to understand why sending cartographer data is wrong?
His model is iLife A11 that has Lidar. He probably has an app that is used to control robot and shows cleaning progression. Vac 100% Lidar'd his entire home and sent data to create map in the app.
How in the fuck he thinks it is getting that map? If his ass so smart to find a killswitch and reverse it, how come he doesn't grasp that map data is sent to a server though which he ca use vac app? Like in what world is it not obvious?
Not even gonna discuss about TOS he signed, or that it is general cheap brand cheap but super smart model for it's price.
Unless some FOSS firmware and software is installed, that thing most certainly will ping back home every chance it gets.
Sidenote: My TV now is offline cause when it kept calling home (ove 60% of my pi-holes querries of all time was TV), it would freeze due to pi-hole block. Once set offline - issue is gone. I also know my robo vac is pinging, but at the same time if I block it, I'll lose app controls which I wont do. Sadly, my vac doesn't support Valetudo.
I think yes, to your first question. Couldn't it just crunch the lidardata locally to feed into cartographer, I don't understand why you don't understand that this is the issue.
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I don't care if they map my house, just give me raw access to the data. Them having access to the speaker and mic, i'm more concerned about.
I live in a prefabricated home that is a different color than my neighbor's. Can I gift them one of these robots to get a blueprint of their house? It is already easily googled but I feel that making a robot do it keeps them lower on the food chain.