The inside of a lawmaker's house? A general's? A CEO's? Why would anyone ever want insider information, including possible blackmail evidence, from them?
Also I would assume it's a lot more dangerous and expensive to send someone in when you can just put an innocuous robot into a room which has cameras and microphones that can watch + listen 24/7 and auto-recharges when the battery is low (unlike surveillance devices).
(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)
I will reference a quote I originally heard on HN years ago, though: the audio surveillance is magnitudes more valuable than the video.
To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba.
The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.
Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat#Chi...
It's very easy to think other people are being paranoid when you're ignorant about the topic.
https://blog.avast.com/what-do-security-cameras-know-about-y...
Data brokers love this data, dont play with me I know you better than that
https://www.cloaked.com/post/the-data-broker-economy-will-hi...
HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.
Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.
We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
The book Surveillance Capitalism wrote about this a decade ago: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56791
If people are still skeptical then they are ignoring reality.
X now gets monthly checks from Y. Done.