A Verge reporter who spoke with iRobot’s CEO, chairman and founder Colin Angle earlier this summer was told the iRobot OS would give its Roomba bots a deeper understanding of consumer’s homes and habits. And now Amazon, which already gets a deluge of consumer data from its Alexa smart devices and Ring video monitoring system, has acquired iRobot for $1.7 billion.
This is naturally raising some privacy concerns about the use of this data in combination, as Roomba vacuums and mops map and re-map living spaces to know things like when a room has flipped to a new use, or when a sofa is purchased and where it’s located. It’s also part of Amazon’s bigger ambition to own the smart home market.
To explore these issues a bit more, including antitrust concerns associated with the acquisition, we spoke with Jason Boyce, founder and CEO of Avenue7Media and author of “The Amazon Jungle” in our latest MCM CommerceChat podcast.
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