Roomba's robot vacuum cleaner takes pictures of its owner in toilet: How do these photos get on Internet?

In the fall of 2020, a series of photos were posted on an online forum. Most of the photos didn't show anything remarkable – just the usual shots of the interiors of apartments and houses. But in some of the pictures you can see more intimate scenes, clearly not meant for other people's eyes.

For example, the woman in one of the pictures was photographed in the bathroom. In another picture you can see a boy of 8-9 years old lying on the floor and looking at the lens just below his eye level. And while in the first one the woman's face is barely discernible, the boy's face is clearly visible.

All these pictures were not taken by humans, but by a robot vacuum cleaner. And they were published by remote workers at Scale AI in Venezuela, which is dedicated to tagging photos, audio and video for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems.

As MIT Technology Review noted, iRobot – the world's largest supplier of robotic vacuum cleaners, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion – has confirmed that the images were indeed taken by its Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners in 2020. However, company officials say they were modified versions of the vacuum cleaners that never went on sale: they were given away to employees and others who, for a fee, agreed to broadcast the data collected by the robot vacuum cleaner to train an artificial intelligence system.

According to the company, when the robot vacuum cleaner starts taking pictures, a special indicator on its body lights up, moreover, people can delete all materials of a confidential nature.

Many devices, from smartphones to washing machines, collect data to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Marking up the resulting data is an important part of this work: brief explanations describing what is depicted in a photo or video are usually written by people – employees of special companies – a young but fast-growing industry whose annual turnover, according to analysts, will reach $13.3 billion by 2030.

Founded in 2016, Scale AI is one of the largest companies in the field. And it was its employees, who were discussing work issues online, who leaked data obtained by Roomba vacuum cleaners (according to iRobot, more than 2 million images were transferred to this contractor for AI training). Because of the leak, iRobot had to terminate its relationship with this company and launch an investigation into the incident in order to understand how to prevent similar leaks in the future.