Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. James Baussmann, iRobot’s spokesperson, said in an email the company had “taken every precaution to ensure that personal data is processed securely and in accordance with applicable law,” and that the images shared with MIT Technology Review were “shared in violation of a written non-disclosure agreement between iRobot and an image annotation service provider.” In an emailed statement a few weeks after we shared the images with the company, iRobot CEO Colin Angle said that “iRobot is terminating its relationship with the service provider who leaked the images, is actively investigating the matter, and taking measures to help prevent a similar leak by any service provider in the future.” The company did not respond to additional questions about what those measures were. iRobot has said that it has shared over 2 million images with Scale AI and an unknown quantity more with other data annotation platforms the company has confirmed that Scale is just one of the data annotators it has used. The 15 images shared with MIT Technology Review are just a tiny slice of a sweeping data ecosystem. “There’s always a group of humans sitting somewhere-usually in a windowless room, just doing a bunch of point-and-click: ‘Yes, that is an object or not an object,’” explains Matt Beane, an assistant professor in the technology management program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the human work behind robotics. But to make these data sets useful for machine learning, individual humans must first view, categorize, label, and otherwise add context to each bit of data. This data is then used to build smarter robots whose purpose may one day go far beyond vacuuming. “And they can drive around in your home-and you have no way to control that.” This is especially true, he adds, of devices with advanced cameras and artificial intelligence-like iRobot’s Roomba J7 series. They have “powerful hardware, powerful sensors,” says Dennis Giese, a PhD candidate at Northeastern University who studies the security vulnerabilities of Internet of Things devices, including robot vacuums. The data collected by robot vacuums can be particularly invasive. Often, we opt in simply by using the product, as noted in privacy policies with vague language that gives companies broad discretion in how they disseminate and analyze consumer information. The most useful data sets are the most realistic, making data sourced from real environments, like homes, especially valuable. Much of this technology is based on machine learning, a technique that uses large troves of data-including our voices, faces, homes, and other personal information-to train algorithms to recognize patterns. It’s a practice that has only grown more common over the past decade, as data-hungry artificial intelligence has been increasingly integrated into a whole new array of products and services. While the images shared with us did not come from iRobot customers, consumers regularly consent to having our data monitored to varying degrees on devices ranging from iPhones to washing machines. iRobot declined to let MIT Technology Review view the consent agreements and did not make any of its paid collectors or employees available to discuss their understanding of the terms. Please reach out at other words, by iRobot’s estimation, anyone whose photos or video appeared in the streams had agreed to let their Roombas monitor them. According to iRobot, the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,” and it was up to those paid data collectors to “remove anything they deem sensitive from any space the robot operates in, including children.”ĭid you participate in iRobot's data collection efforts? We'd love to hear from you. They were given to “paid collectors and employees” who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes. All of them came from “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,” the company said in a statement. IRobot-the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal-confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.
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