Robot Vacuums Collect More About Your Home Than You Might Expect, and Here Is How to Lock It Down

Summary

Engadget walks through what robot vacuums can collect, including floor maps, cleaning histories, room names, and, on some models, audio or video, and how that data can pass through manufacturer servers. It cites a DJI Romo flaw that gave one owner control of roughly 7,000 vacuums, since fixed. Advice includes avoiding mandatory cloud features, favoring on-device processing, using two-factor authentication, and keeping firmware current.

Why it matters

A robot vacuum maps your home’s layout and connects to your Wi-Fi. A few settings changes cut the exposure.

HTD Says

Your vacuum knows your floor plan and when you are home, so spend five minutes in its app turning off remote viewing and any cloud-only features you don’t use. Of course, this depends on the robot vacuum manufacturer and what controls their app offers. And, once again, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies (but who reads those, right?).

I have a robot vacuum, but its battery is dead, and we no longer use it. My wife and I vacuum manually, so there are no privacy concerns here. It’s a “local-only” type of implementation. But I have thought about this issue for quite some time. I always thought that it would be a perfect spy device. Hacking it would let a “bad actor” know everything about your home: the layout, activities, people, and items, among other things.

So be careful about what you really want. Does having your full home layout and activities stored on a remote server somewhere overseas bother you? If not, fire up that robot vacuum. If it does, get some exercise and vacuum manually yourself. Regardless, give the article a read.

Source:

Engadget