By While most people were engrossed in the Winter Olympics or the State of the Union Address, my attention was diverted to another event entirely.
A man in Spain reverse-engineered his robot vacuum using an artificial intelligence coding program so he could use his PlayStation5 controller as a remote. That way he could steer his robotic vacuum. According to Popular Science’s website, the man found “that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries.”
Donna Marmorstein, Aberdeen Insider Columnist
This meant he had inadvertently hacked into cameras and microphones installed on the vacuums, and he would have been able to view the floor plans in all the places those vacuums cleaned. Fortunately, the guy reported it, and the company says it patched the security flaws.
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Consumers are rightly worried about the ease at which someone could stumble upon such power.
My daughter gave me a robot vacuum a while back. I don’t think it had a camera because it seemed to gauge where it was by bumping into things and backing up a lot.
Something went wrong with it, and when I unscrewed it to try to fix it, I ruined it. A little later, I decided to buy a new one, and I’m pretty sure this one has both a camera and a microphone.
I don’t know why any vacuum would need a microphone. Wouldn’t it just hear itself making noise? Unless the whole purpose was to spy on homes and it listened for things when it wasn’t running.
This whole Internet of Things business can be worrisome, and combined with AI powers, we could be in big trouble. My fridge already knows my menu choices, and of course, Alexa knows everything, although she pretends she doesn’t.
I had no idea my vacuum could reveal the deep, dark secrets of my household. It might be able to report to China how many dust bunnies lurk under my bed or angry conversations I have with my printer.
It could reveal to domestic crime families how long I let my kitchen floor remain dirty before cleaning it.
It could disclose to the state of Israel the brand of socks I’ve left just lying for days on the living room floor!
My vacuum could show hostile space aliens, or Trump’s concentration camp guards, or sinister Russian hackers, or Qatari spies the chewed up dog toys I still haven’t replaced.
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These spy vacuums map out floor plans, too, and that info is a dangerous thing to have in the hands of bad actors.
I keep getting ads for Murphy bookshelves from different furniture companies. These are doors that are disguised as bookshelves.
I’m always tempted to buy one so that if malevolent forces try to hunt me down, I’ll have an Anne Frank room hidden by the Murphy door. That’s not going to work now that evil masterminds have full access to my floor plan.
We live in dangerous times. My smart TV told me so.
Donna Marmorstein lives and writes in Aberdeen. Contact her at [email protected].