Amazon will see everything inside your home  

A privacy nightmare

Amazon ‘s recent acquisition of iRobot for $1.7 billion may sound like an innocent expansion of the tech giant into the field of robotic vacuums, but the reality is more complicated.

In terms of smart home technology, Amazon definitely needs to map the spaces that the Roomba vacuums sweep, to gain a better understanding of the space. This kind of data is digital gold for Amazon to improve the smart technologies it offers consumers and sell more products. But as much as consumers want home automation to work better, they don’t want to share more sensitive information, such as the inside of their home.

In its latest model, iRobot added a camera that, using artificial intelligence, was able to identify over 43 million objects in users’ homes. So the acquisition by Amazon is probably not about robotic vacuum cleaners but about valuable data.

We truly believe in spatial intelligence, an environment where your devices connect with AI to deliver much more than any individual device can. – Marja Koopmans, Director Alexa smart home

So what’s next for smart homes?

The frontier for the next level of artificial intelligence in robotics is not the best AI. It’s relativity. We can understand the command “go to the kitchen and get me a beer” for a decade. But if we don’t know where the kitchen is, where the fridge is, what a beer looks like, it doesn’t matter if we understand your words.

Amazon currently has four brands of smart home technologies beyond the Alexa platform. Security camera company Ring, more affordable camera company Blink, mesh Wi-Fi company Eero, and now iRobot, filling in all the pieces needed for an almost “conscious” smart home that can predict what you want it to do before you ask for it.

However, the trust of consumers in the company that manages this kind of personal data remains to be seen…