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An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs.

Ecovacs’s privacy policy—available elsewhere in the app—allows for blanket collection of user data for research purposes, including:

The 2D or 3D map of the user’s house generated by the device
Voice recordings from the device’s microphone
Photos or videos recorded by the device’s camera

It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.

No word on whether the recorded audio is being used to train the vacuum in some way, or whether it is being used to train a LLM.

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