A voyeur robot vacuum cleaner?
Roomba j7 user had the strange surprise to see a picture of him sitting on the toilet published without his knowledge on Facebook. The image is in fact of a robot vacuum cleaner equipped with a camera and used to develop the final product (the manufacturer indicates that the prototype had a green sticker indicating that the device recorded videos) and entrusted to collaborators or people paid to help with development. The conditions of use clearly indicated that the images would be analyzed in order to carry out the tests. The firm iRobot, to which we owe the Roomba and bought last August by Amazon for 1.7 billion dollars, blames the company Scale AI responsible for analyzing the images in order to help develop a powerful recognition algorithm.
An analysis made by humans
The problem comes from the analysis of these shots by humans, responsible for annotating the photos in order to indicate the presence of various objects and thus train the artificial intelligence as well as possible. Humans being fallible, it was a few individuals employed by Scale AI who might not help but share these images, although this is strictly prohibited by their contract.. The image of the young woman on the toilet is not the only one, fifteen shots (at least) have thus been published on the web, including that of a child watching the device evolve at ground level. This story will have the merit of making a user think twice before agreeing to improve the services of a company, and should also change forever the view that you will have of your robot vacuum cleaner in the future (if the latter is equipped with a camera, which will quickly become the norm) when he sees you in light clothing, or during a private activity.
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