Today morning I read a really nice article / blog post “The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me“. The whole story is about a guy who disallowed his smart vacuum cleaner to access the internet. After a while it failed, got repaired, failed again, got repaired and after all stopped working.
TL;DR: seems like it was finally disabled from manufacturer side!
But first: a big shoutout to the guy disassembling and reverse engineering the whole machine. This was for sure not an easy task.
But it shows an inherent misconception of such smart devices: The vacuum cleaner could operate without internet connection. Why are we as consumers so forced to let this happen. If I decide to have the device offline: why not just let us do that?
The thing obviously needs to know how the appartment looks like. Okay, do it on the machine. And let us opt in/out to transfer the data for tuning/optimization purposes.
For a firmware / algorithm update — I see why it should go online, no problem. But why does a vacuum cleaner need a permanent internet connection?! That’s just wrong.
Read the full story: https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-turned-against-me
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