Then the images ended up on Facebook.
NEW YORK (PNN) - December 28, 2022 - A new finding from MIT Technology Review may make you second guess getting dressed in front of your Roomba vacuum.
Investigative journalist Eileen Guo revealed images of a woman sitting on a toilet found their way onto Facebook after being captured from a Roomba J7.
iRobot, the company that produces the robotic vacuum, in a statement revealed that the Roomba J7 vacuums were “special development robots with hardware and software modifications that are not and never were present on iRobot consumer products for purchase,”
The tech company said the J7 Roombas were only given to “paid collectors and employees who signed written agreements acknowledging that they were sending data streams, including video, back to the company for training purposes.”
So, how did the images taken by the J7 Roomba vacuum make their way onto the Web?
The images taken by the Roomba were sent to Scale AI, a tech startup that hires workers around the globe to help train AI.
Per the Entrepreneur, the AI Scale contract workers based in Venezuela posted the picture of the woman on the toilet in a private group on Facebook and Discord.
iRobot has since terminated its contract with the contractors who were responsible for “leaking” the images.
