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Now even housewives spy on us: How a woman's photos ended up on the Internet

2022-12-23 18:02:20Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

 

Now even housewives spy on us: How a woman's photos ended up on the
Now even housewives spy on us: How a woman's photos ended up on the Internet

 

The photo of a woman in the toilet of her home has raised the alarm about the potential that household appliances have to eavesdrop on us. The photo of the unknown woman was taken from a vacuum cleaner and ended up on social networks.

Now even housewives spy on us: How a woman's photos ended up on the

The angle from which the photo was taken is very low, almost from the floor. The photo was captured by one of the millions of robotic vacuum cleaners circulating around homes around the world.

It is about an iRobot Roomba, the vacuum cleaner par excellence. But how did that photo end up on the web? And above all: we must take privacy seriously. The story originally reconstructed by Mit Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's information and knowledge magazine on technology, reveals a lot about how smart devices work and the potential risks we expose ourselves to when we buy one.

The photo was taken from a Roomba J7, one of iRobot's latest and most advanced models. The device has a real video camera on the front, which is assisted by a very powerful LED. This allows the robot to recognize the spaces to be cleaned, identify furniture and obstacles and therefore clean where it is needed with extreme efficiency. The woman's image is captured by this electronic eye. In the set of photos completed online, a child about 8-9 years old can be seen, lying on his stomach in a corridor. Other photos feature rooms with furniture, furnishings, plants and even a dog. The elements framed by the video camera are in a colored rectangle with a text label identifying them: «tv», «plant or flower», «wardrobe» and so on. A detail that reveals the origin of the images: the photos were taken by iRobot, maker of the Roomba, at Scale AI, a startup that pays people around the world to tag audio, photos and videos. This data is used to train artificial intelligence.

Company explanation

iRobot said the vacuum cleaners in question were test units, not yet commercialized, used to help the company develop the robots' learning capabilities. The photos came from "special development robots with hardware and software modifications and are not featured in iRobot's final products," said iRobot president and CEO Colin Angle. The robots, according to the company, were given to employees and contractors of companies such as Scale AI, which perform data collection, and were labeled with a clear green sticker that said "video recording in progress." Employees had to, again according to iRobot, "remove any sensitive elements, such as children, from the space in which the vacuum cleaner works."

Use and circulation of photos

The case comes as Amazon works to close a $1.7 billion deal to buy iRobot and again raises many questions about how tech companies use and protect the data they collect. In this case, Scale AI staff worked on a project for iRobot to "tag" photos so the robot cleaners could better recognize the objects around them, according to MIT Tech Review. It should be noted that so-called "data taggers" are low-wage contract workers, often residing outside the United States.

/ Corriere.it 


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