In case anyone's interested, there's actually open-source self-hosted robot vacuum firmware for select models

I mean, this has been known about for pretty much all smart vacuums.

But who the fuck is going to use the layout of your house for anything?

Wait till you find out what your wifi can do.

At this point, if you buy a smart thing you have to know it's spyware.

If you have a robot vacuum, and the robot vacuum makes a persistent map (as opposed to the older "dumber" models that just bounce around randomly), they all send that map back to some remote server. In fact, most of those robots won't even enable the mapping feature unless they're connected to the Internet (which is absolute bullshit considering most of those robots generate, process, and store that map locally, so there's literally no reason to send it off somewhere).

So your options are to just use the robot without ever connecting it to the Internet and be happy with the reduced featureset, root the robot and install Valetudo on it, or just vacuum manually. But until manufacturers are forced to let us actually own the smart devices they sell is, under no circumstances should you ever let one touch the Internet.

Since I dont see it mentioned, the company is

iLife

iLife makes vacuums that map your house and can be remote controlled

Just so we are clear. You should all up your name and shame game.

On paper all of this stuff is a great idea that would make our appliances more functional.

In reality, the best case scenario is that it’s sold to our corporate overlords so they can slap an ad on your refrigerator and sell you more plastic waste.

Worst case, it’s sold to ICE or some other fascist regime.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/ring-cameras-are-about-to-get-increasingly-chummy-with-law-enforcement/

I've been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they're basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the "go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock" or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, some guy's got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.

I guess I'm willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that's more practical to do on the company's servers than on the device itself...except not really; we've got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don't cost much, don't take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can't get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn't broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.

“Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

They kill switched it remotely. Yikes.

I remember about news of some Israeli intelligence operatives who jogged around their HQ only to be outed by their tracks on Strava.

At first I thought ”Well, duh!”, but the manufacturer having a remote kill switch when he network blocked his vacuum from sharing his home map data with them, as well as unprotected root access when connecting to the vacuum… urgh.

The engineer says he stopped the device from broadcasting data, though kept the other network traffic — like firmware updates — running like usual. The vacuum kept cleaning for a few days after, until early one morning when it refused to boot up.

After reverse engineering the vacuum, a painstaking process which included reprinting the devices’ circuit boards and testing its sensors, he found something horrifying: Android Debug Bridge, a program for installing and debugging apps on devices, was “wide open” to the world. “In seconds, I had full root access. No hacks, no exploits. Just plug and play,” Narayanan said.

I used to be on a mailing list where American companies offered money to people in the third world for menial manual tasks. Like sending pictures of random crap from different angles and such. One time I got an email offering 4 of these things and $100 and all I had to do was put one of them in my home and use it for a week and give the other 3 away. Goes without saying they're clearly a privacy nightmare.

Yeah that issue has been around for at least a couple years now. Luckily my robovac doesn't have WiFi or bluetooth

Every gadget spies on you if you think about it.