Photos taken by a Roomba leaked on the Internet: What happened to data security?

It is normal for the old generations distrust some of today’s digital items. A device with a camera can be very useful, but at the same time very dangerous. A very delicate episode has occurred for the company iRobot. Some photos taken by one Roomba leaked on a Facebook page, according to review Technology Review.

The aforementioned specialized medium explains that the photographs, completely intimate of the homes where the devices were, were captured by different Roomba version J7 of iRobot. For those who don’t know them, these are very efficient electronic vacuum cleaners among the household items that can be integrated into the ‘Home’.

It was not a person from the iRobot company who was in charge of the vacuum cleaner. The images were leaked by the machine learning mechanisms of Scale AI “a startup that hires workers from all over the world to label audio, photo and video data used to train artificial intelligence”, details Technology Review.

The images were published, in principle, in closed groups of social networks. There’s a little bit of everything. In one image there is a woman going to the bathroom, another has a child of about 8 or 9 years old playing in a house and the rest show the interiors of different houses.

The company shields itself with a statement in which it explains that these vacuum cleaners were not for sale to the public. They were special versions with some differences in their systems.

“They were special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and have never been present in iRobot consumer products for purchase. They were given to collectors and paid employees who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, to the company for training purposes. The devices were marked with a bright green tag that read ‘video recording in progress’, they said.

The mentioned site indicates that it went to iRobot to show those consent agreements of the people who appear in the photos or the owners whose houses were leaked on social networks. The startup refused to share such information, so the data vulnerability remains a possibility.

The company does clarify that although these images were leaked, it is because they were test equipment. With those that go on sale there would be no possibility of this, since people are not expected to have access to this database.