Not sure if one even exists, but if it does I figured you guys would know of one
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I think a good place to start is by defining in what ways a “robot vacuum” isn’t private in the first place. What do they do that is not private?
edit: looks like Mozilla’s “Privacy Not Included” website has some reviews for Robo Vacuums, that is a good place to start your research.
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I got this recommended when asking around:
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To my understanding some were mapping out floor plans and storing on the cloud unecnrypted (this may not be true as I’ve only just heard of this years ago). The more concerning one was one vendor recording audio and selling it to 3rd party. That’s 100% never going to be in my house.
Thank you for the link, I like the sound of the irobot one. Even if it is purchased by Amazon
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Unfortunately this is one of the common things with IoT devices, they do not give you enough to be able to host locally on site.
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I’d like to share an interesting article that caught my eye:
Are we all just cleaning manually? Thoughts?
At their price point (1795 USD with 2 years warranty), does having a house helper (at 75 USD/month vs a robotic one) make more sense? I dont know how much cleaner rates are in the US. What about the helper’s gadget/mobile devices? Or if the helper works for a bigger company that may gather your info?
I’m a certified IoT hater in general (no smart-anything in my house except smartphones) but also I may be weird for finding vacuuming manually relaxing so this seems super expensive for not that much benefit
Also it seems like the answer to the question in the title is yes lol
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For those that actually wants a vacuum slave, there’s also this for cheaper
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+1 to Valetudo. I recently went through the process with the Dreame L10s Ultra and it was super straightforward. I ran into one small hiccup, but opened a ticket with the developer and they pushed a fix a couple days later.
That being said, you have to want to use Valetudo, understand the consequences, and have some technical knowledge. Hoping there will be a more consumer-friendly option at some point, but it is the best option at the moment, in my opinion.
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US$75/month is a pretty conservative estimate. I know a freelance housekeeper who earns $15/hour if I recall correctly, so that would only be 5 hours per month. A robot vacuum could be run much more for the flat cost of purchase (and relatively negligible power cost). As usual, however, the human will doubtless do a better job, particularly being able to clean anything other than the ground.
Yes, the housekeeper’s presumably tracker-infested phone will theoretically leak their schedule of visits, but are tracking dragnets robust enough to correlate the housekeeper’s location data with ownership/residence data of the address, and identify your employment of a freelance housekeeper? Also, (assuming you aren’t messaging your housekeeper via Signal) your calls and texts to your housekeeper are certainly a much simpler medium to data mine.
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Probably, yes.
I do wonder what the privacy implications of knowing someone’s housekeeper’s schedule actually are though… but I’m sure some exist.
I don’t know where you live that a helper is that cheap, but I would argue that some stranger getting into your house and seeing/touching your stuff can be more of a security/privacy risk that some automated vacuum assuming you can get a model that uses no camaras/mic and/or run fully offline.
I live in a third world remote-ish island. The local minimum cost of monthly salary of helpers is just over 100 USD/month (by law). Our household pays more.
People are vetted/referred by other people. There is less privacy but at the 100 USD price point, its more cost effective to just hire people
Got ya, but you understand that is not the reality for everyone and there are also cheaper vacuums that would be cheaper on the long run.
This is of course keeping in mind that a helper could do more than a vacuum
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