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Tell Your Roomba to Stop Sharing a Map of Your Home . But to get that map, according to customer service reps, you have to share it with Roomba’s creator i. Robot. And that gives i. Robot permission to give—or sell—your map. Which is exactly what i. Robot CEO Colin Angle plans to do, as he told Reuters this week: Angle told Reuters that i. Robot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to sell its maps to one or more of the Big Three in the next couple of years.

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2. The Roomba 900 Series offers a Clean Map Report, which maps your home as it vacuums, improving its movement and telling you how well it cleaned. But to get that map.

Of course, if you ever opted into Clean Map Reports, you technically already gave i. Robot that permission. It’s just another of the many ways consumers are unknowingly giving up their privacy.

Thanks to the NSA, everyone all of a sudden cares about their privacy more than they used to. While an online customer service rep directed me to the Twitter account and Angle’s statement, a phone rep confidently informed me that i. Robot would not sell data.

When I read him Angle’s statement, he was caught off guard. If you already let your Roomba deliver a Clean Map Report to i. Robot, it’s unclear whether there’s any way to retroactively revoke permission to sell that report.

I’ve reached out to i. Robot for clarification and will update with their reply. Update (5: 1. 5 E. T., Jul 2. 5): i. Robot PR responded with this statement: To clarify, i. Robot has not formed any plans to sell data.

No data is sold to third- parties. No data will be shared with third- parties without the informed consent of our customers. If a customer had already signed up/opted in, i. Robot will delete the data from our servers if a customer requests it. This is retroactive. Clean Map Reports are not shared with third parties.

If a Roomba owner does not want to share data with a third party such as Amazon (for example, to enable voice control from Amazon Alexa), the owner can simply disable the skill in the Amazon Alexa app. Update (6 P. M. E. T., Jul 2. 8): Reuters has amended their story to state that according to CEO Colin Angle, i. Microsoft Excel Drill Down Charts 2017. Robot may “share for free with consumer consent,” not “sell its maps.” i. Robot representatives stated, “i. Robot does not sell customer data,” and said future information sharing will only be conducted with customers’ explicit consent.

Smart Device Breaks Up Domestic Dispute By Calling the Police . Following a recent case in which Amazon handed over data from its Echo device to police investigating a murder, a smart device called the police when a couple was allegedly involved in a violent domestic dispute. Police say that Eduardo Barros was house- sitting at the residence with his girlfriend and their daughter. Barros allegedly pulled a gun on his girlfriend when they got into an argument and asked her: “Did you call the sheriffs?” A smart device in the home apparently heard “call the sheriffs,” and proceeded to call the sheriffs. A SWAT team arrived at the home and after negotiating for hours, they were able to take Barros into custody.

Police tell ABC News that the man’s girlfriend was injured but did not need to visit a hospital. The couple’s daughter was safe and unharmed.“The unexpected use of this new technology to contact emergency services has possibly helped save a life,” Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales III said in a statement. Barros was charged with possession of a firearm or destructive device by a felon, aggravated battery against a household member, aggravated assault against a household member and false imprisonment. While smart home technology is the hero in the case, it will certainly leave some people uneasy.

It’s a clear reminder that smart home devices are always listening. We don’t know what data, if any, was recorded by the Amazon Echo that was involved in the December murder case. But police felt confident enough that it may have recorded audio of the incident to seek a warrant. In a different incident in January, a local TV news broadcast involving a dollhouse reportedly triggered multiple Amazon Echo devices in the area to start ordering dollhouses. It’s easy to imagine police getting tired of being called to citizen’s homes every time they watch the latest episode of Law and Order. Correction: ABC News has amended and editor’s note to its story clarifying that the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department did not specify the type of smart device that called them to the home. Darwin Streaming Server Centos 6 Install Mysql.

An earlier version of this post cited ABC’s story and claimed a Google Home called police.