Someone needs to translate the significance of the privacy agreements you already sign when you agree to use the products within this emerging value chain. I hope the Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun looking at these matters. There are implications in retail (with beacons), public transit, energy, telecoms, surveillance, public health and more.

Microsoft’s recently announced Path Guide also shows its interest in indoor navigation. That’s before you end up with holographic furniture ads appearing in your front room while you’re trying to eat.Īpple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google-all four firms are chasing this kind of data.Īpple put indoor maps of airports and malls inside of iOS 11 and has acquired multiple indoor mapping startups (WiFiSLAM, indoor.io, FlyByMedia and so on). How can this data be used? Think about spatial technology to help audio equipment manufacturers build better sound stages in your home, intelligent and contextual smart lighting systems, and heating and ventilation design. The latest high-end Roomba hosts technology that is designed to achieve more with the information it collects, but the direction is certainly toward more detailed special mapping technology.

Spatial awarenessĪll the same, to make indoor maps at scale we need technologies that are more capable of recognizing and distinguishing between walls, furniture and other items. The need to consent to such things seems essential. iRobot believes that in the future, this information could provide even more value for our customers by enabling the smart home and the devices within it to work better, but always with their explicit consent.' Right now, the data Roomba collects enables it to effectively clean the home and provides customers with information about cleaning performance. We will never violate our customer’s trust by selling or misusing customer-related data, including data collected by our connected products. 'iRobot does not sell data customer data. Īngle knows that the latest Roomba robot has much more advanced mapping capabilities, but in his later statement wanted to stress: 'There's an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,' Colin Angle, company chief executive, Reuters reported he said, before correcting the story.

Applemap