As someone who works in cloud technologies, it’s not the connection to the cloud that gives me nightmares. It’s the storage on the cloud.
Your rhoomba is a neat and efficient little machine because it stores all of its programmed paths on the cloud: every room it’s been in, the location of every piece of furniture, and most importantly, the hours it’s put to work. Enough data, and we have most (if not all) of your floorplan, the location of every major and minor piece of furniture, the occupants of your household, and a pretty good idea of your household’s usual routines.
Your cloud-connected thermostat tells us when you’re home, when you wake up and go to sleep, when you’re gone each day, and when you’re away for vacation. If that thermostat also has occupant-sensitivity (ie, turns itself down when no movement is detected), that’s a wonderful datapoint for tracking your routine. And if the thermostat ‘learns’ your patterns enough to make suggestions, that’s because it’s stored everything in the cloud – along with a million other peoples’ data – to statistically infer your behavior.
Your fridge can suggest recipes for the food you’ve stored, which means it’s sending a query into the cloud with the contents of your current fridge. If it’s predictive – such as, telling you what you normally eat and suggesting a grocery list to resupply – that means it’s also tracking what you eat, how often, how fast, and when you do most of your shopping.
With your address, I can get publicly-available data on how much you paid for the house, its age, and its rough square footage. With the rhoomba, I can guess you go out and do things on your days off, that you have at least two animals, that you have a child of walking age, an eat-in kitchen and a formal dining room, hardwood floors, and at least three rugs of high enough quality that you’ve programmed the rhoomba to avoid munching on the rugs’ tassels. The thermostat tells me you’re early to bed and early to rise, that you keep the house relatively cold during hot summers and that your HVAC sometimes struggles to keep up. Your fridge tells me how much you spend, your entertainment patterns, and a fairly good idea of your tastes.
I now know when, where, what, and how to hit you with advertisements for holiday entertaining, high-end furniture, home remodeling, appliance replacement – and a fairly well-educated guess on your budget for each. There’s a billion other things I could see, deduce, and use from your collected data. Not every use would be as innocuous as advertisements, either.
And yes, your collected data is available for purchase by corporations beyond the one who made a single appliance. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Remember, Target was able to use its customer data to set up a predictive system that identified pregnant women before the women were even aware themselves — and that was just sales data. Imagine what Target, and all its corporate brethren, can learn about you now that you’ve basically put your entire private life on the cloud, right there for the taking.
