Amazon buys iRobot, meaning Jeff Bezos may now have a map of your entire home By Ethan Huff for Grocery
The latest company to be absorbed into the Amazon empire is iRobot, which sells Roomba vacuums that map out people’s homes and quietly send the data back to the mothership.
Now that Jeff Bezos and his cronies have access to said data, they will know even more personal details about the lives of their customers – who are the same type, by the way, that seem to be fine with the presence of always-listening “smart” devices like Alexa creeping inside their living spaces.
Just recently, iRobot introduced a new “software operating system” for its robot home appliances that “provide its household bots with a deeper understanding of your home and your habits,” according to the technology news website the Verge.
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This is music to the ears of Bezos, who lives to spy and surveil people with his Orwellian tech endeavors.
“The vacuum company has detailed knowledge of our floor plans and, crucially, how they change,” wrote smart home reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy for the Verge.
“It knows where your kitchen is, which your kids’ rooms are, where your sofa is (and how new it is), and if you recently turned the guest room into a nursery.”
Tuohy went on to call the data that iRobot devices pull “digital gold” for whoever has access to it – in this case Amazon. The most obvious purpose for that data is to sell people more useless, privacy-invading things. The other is to probe people’s privacy.
“While I’m interested to see how Amazon can leverage iRobot’s tech to improve its smart home ambitions, many are right to be concerned with the privacy implications,” Tuohy wrote.
“People want home automation to work better, but they don’t want to give up the intimate details of their lives for more convenience.”
Amazon’s holdings create a near-complete picture of every detail of its customers’ lives
If you are an Amazon customer who just loves the ease and convenience of paying way too much for products that in many cases can be purchased more cheaply straight from the vendor, then you should know the scope of Amazon’s prying into your personal life.
For instance, Amazon now owns Ring, the doorbell spying company that films people and tracks activity in and around a property. Amazon also owns several other companies that give the mothership access to your medical records, grocery habits and more.
Check out what Erica Joy, the chief technology officer at the DCCC, had to say in a tweet about how much access Amazon now has into its customers’ lives:
“information amazon will have about people:
map of homes (astro / irobot / roomba)
medical records (onemedical)
home network activity (eero)
voice samples (alexa)
video of homes (ring / blink home / astro)
grocery habits (whole foods)
vehicle movement (echo auto)
+ more i can’t fit here”
Included in the “more i can’t fit here” are Amazon’s new Amazon Fresh stores, which are an Orwellian nightmare with thousands of cameras on the ceiling that watch and track your every move while shopping.
At the Amazon Fresh checkout, a person who scanned his or her “mark of the beast” Amazon barcode at the entry turnstile merely has to walk out of the store through a different turnstile without having to go through a checkout line. Amazon later bills your credit card – before sending an itemized receipt, of course, so that customers cannot verify their purchases – and the purchase goes into a hidden Amazon database.
If you care about privacy or even freedom for that matter, you will avoid Amazon and its many umbrella companies like the plague that they are.
