The problem of the domestic robots: your privacy is exposed with them

There are more and more domestic robots. They have opened a new market and soon the houses will be filled with them ... but the privacy of its users is not much less protected.

In 2015 the company iRobot presented its new Roomba, the first model of its autonomous vacuum cleaners that connected to the internet through wifi. In this way, the robot could collect information on the floor of the house to later optimize its tasks, saving on cleaning and saving time. A wonderful progress.

The hare jumped a few months ago, when it was discovered that iRobot could have the information that these vacuum cleaners had been collecting on the homes of their users. They could dispose to the point of selling it to third parties.

That is, the interior map of the house of a Roomba owner could end up in the hands of a third company without his knowledge, even without his consent. Well, the truth is that users had consented to this procedure in terms of service, but of course the clause was hidden in a bunch of legal verbiage and no one has the patience to read that literature ...

Roomba's case is only a symbolic example of how data collected by domestic robots can burst users' privacy. This category of products grows at cruising speed and does so in an environment where regulation seems insufficient to prevent companies from pursuing.

The home help humanoids Pepper or Nao, both created by the French Aldebaran - now subsidiary of the Japanese group Softbank - as well as Jibo - a creature that looks drawn from a Pixar film intended to entertain the little ones and throw a hand to the elders with memory failures - are in the wave of domestic robots. Other examples are the Asus Zenbo or Kuri, built to ensure the safety of the home or entertain the family.

Jibo Robot | Jibo

All of them, with their differences, are designed to keep us company, to take care of ourselves. Their systems recognize faces, voices, even make jokes. And they learn, they learn a lot. All interactions with their owners make them learn. Is not it wonderful?

It is except for one detail. All these robots are made by companies, which connect their creations to the Web. And is that currently any sample of artificial intelligence - such as facial recognition, natural language understanding or automatic learning - requires an internet connection. Only the cloud can guarantee the computing power needed to perform these tasks. And this is the germ of all uneasiness.

The communication with the servers of the manufacturer, where the information is organized so that the robot improves itself, is what focuses all the restlessnesses. Usually companies usually create personal profiles. This means that each product, each unit, learns from its environment and its owners. In this way, each robot will acquire its own individuality, its distinctive features.

There is no doubt that to better serve the interests, needs and desires of users, robots have to learn about them. They are in a precooked state, but consumers have to heat them in the microwave to leave them ready and at their point - all this in metaphor, please, no one put a poor robot in the micro.

The point is that users mold their robots as they interact with them. As it were, they teach them things. Actually it is not very different from what happens with the predictive keyboards of the mobiles: they are preconfigured for the same world, but the more it is used by a user, it fits the way of writing, placing the tildes more accurately and even adopting new vocabulary.

The idea is that these keyboards, these robots, are more useful the more they interact with their users. All this is made possible by the servers of the manufacturers, where the stimuli received by the robot are processed, chewed and returned to the hardware doll that the user has purchased.

The problem is all this data, and here the imagination can loose moorings: what time does a user eat breakfast, how much time does he spend away from home per day, what time does he return from work, his sleep hours, which television, distribution of your house, the location of this, what kind of furniture you have, how you saw it, how your face is, your voice, how many people live with it ...

Once that information enters the servers of the robot manufacturer, we lose control over it. Welcome to the present.