According to a recent report from the MIT Technology Review, a woman’s Roomba robot vacuum cleaner recently took photos of her on the toilet. Those photos ended up on Facebook. The gig workers in a foreign country shared them.
“The MIT Technology Review recently reported that during the autumn of 2020, a group of gig workers based in Venezuela posted various pictures on online platforms where they discussed work-related matters.
“The images, some of which were often intimate in nature, showed scenes from inside homes taken from a low perspective.
“The images were not taken by a person but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.”
So apparently, these smart devices take photos and audio all the time.
“They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls.”
They’re “regularly” captured!!!
So, what is my phone, Siri contraption, stove, TV, and refrigerator up to these days? We better reconsider what these things are doing as AI improves and the invasion worsens.
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