Featured Image Credit: iRobot’s Roomba J7
Topics: Technology, News
Joe Harker
Robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot has confirmed that personal images of a woman which ended up being shared on Facebook were taken by one of their Roombas.
Images of the woman, who was on the toilet at the time the photos were taken of her by a Roomba, came from one of their test units, not a purchased device, the company have said.
MIT Technology Review says iRobot were using some Roombas as test units to collect information for 'paid data collectors and employees' to help the company work on their machine-learning.
The pictures were taken by a Roomba J7 in 2020 and sent to Scale AI, a company which labels sounds and images in data to train artificial intelligence to better recognise what it is looking at.
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They include pictures of household interiors, some of them with people and their pets in the frame of the pictures taken by the Roomba.
However, they say that one of the images which they obtained was of a woman on the toilet and the picture had then been posted to closed social media groups by employees meant to look through the data.
Incidents such as these have caused concern over how personal data can be passed along without the knowledge of the subject, to the point that it can result in images of a person being shared on social media.
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In this instance a woman was filmed in a private moment during testing of a Roomba and images from that footage were ultimately shared in closed groups on social media.
iRobot says their retail models are designed to immediately delete any image which contains a picture of a person, and that other images are stored in the cloud for 30 days before being deleted.
They say these pictures can only be accessed by users via an app, and that iRobot cannot access images taken by Roombas sold to the public.
iRobot told us that the Roombas involved in this situation were all research and development devices, not ones which the general public could buy off the shelves.
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These robots contain modifications which allow them to collect data, these modifications are not included on Roombas available for purchase by the public, they were also labelled with green stickers saying 'video recording in progress'.
iRobot CEO Colin Angle released a statement on the matter saying their products ensured 'best in class product security and consumer privacy'.
He said: "The iRobot-related images in question were from development robots used by paid data collectors and employees in 2020 for machine learning purposes.
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"The images are not from production robots in consumers' homes."
"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."
UNILAD has contacted Scale AI for comment.