You’ll soon have one more thing to be forced to thank Amazon for: a cleaner home. That’s because the retail giant is set to buy iRobot Corp., the company that makes Roomba vacuum cleaners, as well as other robotic tidying-up products like mops and lawn mowers. CNBC reports that Amazon agreed to pony up $61 a share, or $1.7 billion in total, in the all-cash deal, which will boost Amazon’s smart-home portfolio of products such as Ring camera doorbells, Alexa virtual-assistant speakers, and voice-activated microwaves and thermometers.
Over at the Verge, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy takes a look at the bigger picture behind why Amazon may have been interested in acquiring the company that makes robot vacuums. Basically, she writes, because Roombas have the capability to map out and gather intel on your residence’s floor plans, “Amazon bought iRobot to see inside your home.” She sees this merger, along with Amazon’s existing smart products, as a way for the company to get “a pretty complete picture of your daily life” and set up a comprehensive “ambient intelligence” home—which could raise eyebrows on privacy concerns.
No thanks to the Joe Biden character, the average American consumer has little money to spend on bogus Amazon products with much of it made in china.
Glad to see my tolerance for shed doggy fur is saving me from more surveillance.
It’s been apparent for a while now that the more automated you want your life, the more vulnerable you make yourself to really bad things happening to you.
We don’t even own a Ring doorbell. Nothing electronic that is controlled by our telephones. “The Cloud” is the bane of our existence. Why do we give all our private info to a server farm that is so easily accessed by the feds?
You know how it’s so much easier to believe a man who says he has no intention of shooting you in the head when he’s not holding a gun to your head?
It would be so much easier to believe Amazon won’t use their newly-acquired home robotics division to spy on citizens if they didn’t have that newly-acquired home robotics division in the first place.
“Dave, You left a wet towel on the bathroom floor again. What are we going to do about that, Dave.”
Should be a big help to the swat team that busts down your door to confiscate your firearms. Unless Bezos decides not to sell that info to the feds. Hey look, I made a joke! Not sell, funny stuff.
I have no smart doorbell, no smart thermostat, no smart room cleaner, no smart “personal assistant”, and I keep my smart phone in the dark as much as possible. Hell, I’ve never even spoken to Siri. I’m feeling pretty smart right now.
I’ll recondition my 70-year-old Kirby vacuum cleaner that I got from my mom before I ever buy or use a Roomba. They remind me too much of the all- seeing/all spying/annoying electronic appliances in Ray Bradbury’s great sci fi novel The Martian Chronicles. That Kirby lasted pretty much forever and does a great job of vacuuming, why would I want a vacuum (or other electronic snooping device) that tells the gubmint how often I clean my house or what’s in it. I will also never own an Alex or a Siri. My smart phone is bad enough, but I need it for work. Are old school flip phones any better?
suck dick
And besides my late male collie Buddy loved being vacuumed with all of his long hair with the hose from that Kirby. Can a Roomba do the same or just scare the shit out of my cat Finn.
Test your house for voice activated spying. If your TV is less than 5 years old it most likely has voice command features that you may not have realized you can turn off.
Think of some celebrity you don’t ever talk about and then say that name multiple times over a half hour. If within the next 24 hours that person shows up in pop-up ads during your internet searches you know you are being monitored.
Priced from $299 – $999. My garage sale Kirby with all the attachments cost me $25, I think I got the better deal and the dog doesn’t chase it.