Amazon's acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba, is a window into a future where one corporation has way too much information about your personal life.
Amazon’s $1.7 billion acquisition of robot vacuum cleaner brand iRobot is currently the talk of the town. But despite all the ways Amazon’s ownership could make Roombas better, the overwhelming sentiment is concern about dwindling privacy and shrinking competition. If you’re already paranoid about Echo speakers listening in on your conversation, the Roomba-maker’s buyout should set off some blaring alarm bells.
It’s true that iRobot gives a portfolio of solid hardware, talent, supply chain reach, and manufacturing capabilities to Amazon., but the e-commerce giant is no stranger to the robotics game, especially those that look like a disk-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner. Just over a month ago, Amazon showcased Proteus, an autonomous warehouse robot that will lug packages around Amazon’s giant facilities without hindering human movement.
An open buffet for ad targeting Amazon ad business is all about ad targeting. The more data points it gets, the more personalized product ads it can show to its audience. iRobot’s acquisition opens a whole new universe for those ambitions. For example, the camera-equipped Roomba cleaners give Amazon unfettered access to the floor plan of your house. Where is the sofa? How big is your kitchen? Is there a nursery? You get the idea.
Another grim possibility is all that data falling into the hands of third-party shady marketing and advertising firms. We all know how the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal exploded into Facebook’s face and continues to be a stain on its reputation. However, barely any industrial research body got into the depth of how the Facebook users, whose data was sold in the wild, were affected and continue to bear the repercussions of it.
That treasure trove of data will soon belong to Amazon. Even though Colin Angle will remain as the CEO of the iRobot division at Amazon, it is not hard to imagine that, down the road, he will face the pressure of sharing more data with Amazon. iRobot already relies heavily on Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure, and it plays well with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, too.“No data will be shared with third-parties without the customer’s knowledge or control.
If you’re hoping all that data is handled securely, there’s some disappointment awaiting you. According to internal documents reviewed by Wired, Amazon’s vast cache of customer data is an open buffet for its employees, and even the company’s own security team has no idea how the data was flowing.From employees snooping on customers to selling data to shady sellers, the report paints a grim picture of how all that sensitive data is open to being abused.
The most worrying Amazon acquisition, one that has set alarm bells ringing all across the industry, is OneMedical. The writing had been on the wall for a while. In 2018, Amazon acquired PillPack to grab a slice of the online pharmacy market. Then, the company revealed the Halo fitness band, which goes beyond typical fitness bands by also analyzing aspects like positivity, energy, and tone of your voice, in addition to body fat measurement using pictures of you in your undies.
With the Roomba brand under its belt, perhaps Amazon will keep selling Roomba robots with the same label and high asking price intact but putting all that tech into a cheaper alternative sold under a new private label. The company currently has over 100 private label brands that sell everything from toilet paper and electronics to cheap t-shirts. Adding a robot vacuum cleaner doesn’t sound too far-fetched.
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