There is no company that has a monopoly on robot vacuum cleaners though, and it's unclear how Amazon would use their positions in other markets to unfairly leverage themselves in the robot vacuum market. How are the EU's actions here protective of the market/consumers?
It's blatantly and obviously clear, and the article addresses this: Amazon will give their own brand of cleaning robot preferential treatment in Amazon product searches.
I'll grant that the ones using RGB cameras for SLAM have potential for exfiltrating information, but floor plans are literally public record. What value could that possibly have?
You can probably tell roughly number (and size) of sofa, chairs, tables, shelving units in each unit. Amount of carpet vs floor space. Total floor space.
That lets you build a dataset of these numbers correlated with all the other things Amazon knows about you. Then target you for ads.
Maybe, it notices that your coffee table is smaller than average than other similar people/apartments. They also know you have previously bought dark colored fake wood furniture before. So they advertise dark colored coffee tables to you, in the price range you would be able to afford.
I would be more concerned about this scenario if Amazon was also capable of discovering that because I purchased 1 door mat, does not mean that I want acquire a hoard of door mats, for my house made entirely of exterior doors.
Floor plans aren't public record, only a rough outline of building size. Go pull up your county's record of your house. At most, you'll get a box diagram showing sizes of different sections of your house, but nothing to indicate the actual layout of anything. These robot vacuums collect much more detailed information than that on millions of houses.
Even where they are public record, there are often limits. San Francisco limits you to six requests per day, costs $0.10 per page, and must be applied in person or via mail.
you mean basically the exact same information that you can get by going to an assessors website or office (in the USA anyway), and looking at the property record card they publish when setting your tax rates? Not to mention when you apply for a building permit, with plans - that all becomes public information.
The comment said "transcribe the floor plan", and this distinction is relevant because there are multiple options for robot vacuum cleaners without cameras.
my snark compensates for the absolute lack of depth of thought in your position. nothing personal — I am simply incredulous at your stance in the face of well…how data and capitalism works, historically.
> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily? you cant? damn. you might wanna do some creativity exercises instead of crapping on your keyboard for everyone to see. embarrassing for you. truly.
Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba. Why do you always assume that people are rubes who are being duped by corporations, as opposed to people who are making a conscious tradeoff?
> Why do you care what data Amazon has about my living space? If you don't like it don't by a Roomba.
How many people have bought Roombas without knowing they would be sold to Amazon in the future? A quick search came up with 40 million units sold so far. Will Amazon offer a full refund to every person who doesn't want their data with Amazon? Or will they offer the option to completely stay off of Amazons systems, keeping the existing Roomba systems running?
If not, do you expect people to somehow accurately predict the future when making purchasing decisions?
I don't think people can predict what will happen to the products they buy in the future. But I do think people can choose to use or not use the products they buy based on new information. And my point is not that this is a good or bad thing (for the record I think it's bad but so is the company going out of business), just that more often than not the loudest consumer advocates seem to have incredibly dim views of consumers themselves. It must be the case that consumers don't know or don't understand the tradeoffs they are making, rather than that consumers simply place a lower value on "privacy".
Is you having the option to choose lower privacy worth 40 million people having lower privacy? That seems to be the dichotomy here - consumer advocates don't just care about new buyers.
> you have no idea what amazon would do with a spatial and/or topographical map of your living space updated almost daily?
Well of course, but the EU already has plenty of privacy laws to deal with that. That's no reason for the EU to object to this acquisition on those grounds.
It seems the primary issue here is that Amazon might be incentivized to disadvantage competing robo-vacuums on their marketplace. Which is not an unfair observation, but a bit strange given how many other Amazon-brand products it is already selling.
Seriously horrifying. If the acquisition went through, Amazon would know exactly what was going on outside AND inside your house since they also own Ring.
Well since the business is now laying off 1/3 of the workforce they have achieved a smaller business. This is a win? Regular people are losing their jobs because European bureaucrats decided they didn’t want to allow a deal the management team called essential.
If a business cannot survive without an acquisition, then that business should not survive. An acquisition should be an avenue for success for the owners, but it should never be the endgame of a business (in my opinion).
Also, I bet $20 Amazon would have laid off a sizable portion of the iRobot workforce anyway just like Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft.
>If a business cannot survive without an acquisition, then that business should not survive.
This is exactly what was happening here, the business was being acquired. Now what I would assume is next is a slow death and then their tech being picked up for cheap after bankruptcy proceedings.
It doesn't really seem like its working. Incredibly bad growth numbers, almost no companies that are growing at a good pace, mediocre performance in aerospace, rise of far right groups everywhere who seem to be winning actual power.
Why does everything have to grow all the time? Isn't there some version of 'we are making enough money and our customers are happy' that can exist? Is it possible to be fine with having enough to live decently, or do we we have to classify everything that doesn't grow constantly a failure?
