Amazon’s planned acquisition of iRobot could let the retailer see maps of your house, on top of everything else they already have on individuals, a privacy watchdog warns.
Amazon’s $US1.7 billion deal to acquire the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner will dramatically increase the scope of Amazon’s surveillance activities if nothing is done to protect user privacy, Digital Rights Watch has warned.definitive merger agreement to acquire iRobot
Amazon didn’t say what it intended to do with the company, but iRobot’s founder and CEO, Colin Angle, will remain on as CEO of the Amazon-owned company, Amazon said in a statement. In order to navigate around a customer’s home, robot vacuum cleaners typically use sensors to build detailed two- and three-dimensional maps of rooms in the house. These are then uploaded to the user’s account so the maps can be shared between different copies of the controller app running on different devices.
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