An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
There’s something not working in this article.
They say it “makes sense” for the device to basically send the plan of your home to some online server, because the vacuum is not powerful enough to process this data on its own. This is already a bit horrifying to me, but okay.
And then when that guy blocked it out, the vacuum “worked for a while” before something sent the kill command through an update.
How come is it still working at all if navigation requires that server?
Most services today have user accounts so they can store your information, that way if you get a new phone for example, you can just sign into a new device and your content is there. So the maps, your configurations etc, are all sent to a remote server so it just works.
Having to manually connect to the robot each time, when you might not even be in the same country when you want to connect, doesn’t work if it’s all done locally.
Companies that want to offer connected services like this but are privacy centric could let you encrypt it before sending it so they can’t see what the contents are, but then you need to manage the idiot populace and their inability to properly secure this kind of information. Then, you start getting all sorts of support calls like I lost the encryption key and now I can’t access my map! What kind of stupid service makes me remap things when I change phones and forget something!?
So there’s no really getting around sending some data back to the server, but even IF they have it unencrypted, there’s no reason other than corporate profit taking to also be using that data. They don’t have to, but they will and do.
It’s not the navigation that requires the server but the processing of the mapping data.
Which in itself is BS because most of these vacuums come with hardware roughly equivalent of a top of the line smartphone from about 5-6 years ago. They can easily do the raw data to map conversion, even if it’s a bit slow and takes 20-30 seconds.
Also if you read the article it specifies that the damn thing is already running Google Cartographer which is a SLAM 3D map builder software - one of the better pro-grade mapping software suites, mind you. So the whole claim of cloud needed for processing is BS.
My VR headset can create pretty accurate 3D maps of my environment like nothing, and it only uses cameras to do so, so I can imagine it’s doable.
Then, yeah, it doesn’t “make sense” for that thing to externalize that.
It’s not that it’s impossible, but it requires effort, skill, and time. Instead of hiring a bunch of programmers who would make it run on the device locally, you can just throw the same amount of money at Amazon and it will run whatever unoptimised version of the renderer you stole on some random Chinese forum. As a bonus, you got to enrich a multibillionaire and make a world slightly worse place, which is a second and third priority of every CEO after getting money.