At first I thought ”Well, duh!”, but the manufacturer having a remote kill switch when he network blocked his vacuum from sharing his home map data with them, as well as unprotected root access when connecting to the vacuum… urgh.

The engineer says he stopped the device from broadcasting data, though kept the other network traffic — like firmware updates — running like usual. The vacuum kept cleaning for a few days after, until early one morning when it refused to boot up.

After reverse engineering the vacuum, a painstaking process which included reprinting the devices’ circuit boards and testing its sensors, he found something horrifying: Android Debug Bridge, a program for installing and debugging apps on devices, was “wide open” to the world. “In seconds, I had full root access. No hacks, no exploits. Just plug and play,” Narayanan said.

Since I dont see it mentioned, the company is

iLife

iLife makes vacuums that map your house and can be remote controlled

Just so we are clear. You should all up your name and shame game.

iLife A11 smart vacuum

In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

They kill switched it remotely. Yikes.

“Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

At this point, if you buy a smart thing you have to know it's spyware.

On paper all of this stuff is a great idea that would make our appliances more functional.

In reality, the best case scenario is that it’s sold to our corporate overlords so they can slap an ad on your refrigerator and sell you more plastic waste.

Worst case, it’s sold to ICE or some other fascist regime.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/ring-cameras-are-about-to-get-increasingly-chummy-with-law-enforcement/

Wait till you find out what your wifi can do.

That is why I have denied internet access for my robot vacuum cleaner. Xiaomi doesn't need to know the blueprint of my house, and if it can't connect to the internet, there's no need for firmware updates.

I'll start the thing by pressing the button at the top.

Well, yes, that's what those cheap "smart" devices do. Or does anyone think cheap smart would fit into that device? Rule of thumb: if a device needs internet access, it is spying on you.

I used to be on a mailing list where American companies offered money to people in the third world for menial manual tasks. Like sending pictures of random crap from different angles and such. One time I got an email offering 4 of these things and $100 and all I had to do was put one of them in my home and use it for a week and give the other 3 away. Goes without saying they're clearly a privacy nightmare.

Yeah, I read about iRobot gathering and selling info about apartments like 10 years ago. People still alarmed by this are simply ignorant.

I don't care if they map my house, just give me raw access to the data. Them having access to the speaker and mic, i'm more concerned about.

I live in a prefabricated home that is a different color than my neighbor's. Can I gift them one of these robots to get a blueprint of their house? It is already easily googled but I feel that making a robot do it keeps them lower on the food chain.

Shit I’m scared of my home speakers echo locating my furniture and the size of my domicile