Your pictures have appeared on Facebook – that reports it Online magazine Technology Review. Surely no one wants to see pictures of themselves sitting on the toilet circulating among strangers on social media. As a result, Technology Review questioned how this breach of privacy could have occurred.
It turned out that the images came from an experimental Roomba vacuum robot, a pre-production model, by the company iRobot. In order to improve the recognition of objects that are in the way while cleaning, the robot sent images to the company for evaluation in order to train an AI with the images.
People work on AI training
In addition, employees of a third-party company check the correct identification. The data protection incident probably happened there: According to Technology Review, several employees exchanged pictures via Facebook, Discord and other services. Why this happened at all is unclear. But this is not an isolated case.
problem data supply chain
The transfer of potentially sensitive data is tied to a “data supply chain” of which few consumers are even aware. The case of iRobot will now be examined in more detail. “People are not expected to look through the raw material,” Justin Brookman, director of technology policy at Consumer Reports and former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Technology Research and Investigations Office, told Technology Review.
iRobot would neither confirm nor deny that the data collectors were aware that humans in particular would view these images. In the declaration of consent, however, it is clear that “service providers” would do this.
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