I am referring, of course, to Amazon’s takeover of Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner people.
What's to be understood here is that this has nothing to do with making a few bucks off of selling vacuum cleaners to people. It's about extracting information from the appliances to do things like mapping people's homes, including things like where high traffic areas are in a house.
It's about Amazon expanding its stalking technology beyond things like Alexa and Ring:
Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it was buying the Roomba vacuum maker iRobot. On the surface, this move looks like a massive online retail marketplace acquiring a popular gadget to sell to its loyal shoppers. Roomba is a sparkling consumer product, and iRobot has sold 40 million of them over the past two decades. Shoppers today find them occupying end caps at big retailers such as Costco and Target. The device’s smooth, spinning design has given it a huge chunk of the $3 billion-a-year robot-vacuum market; three quarters of all smart vacuums sold in America bear the Roomba name. In that way, the deal makes sense.
But my suspicion is that, for Amazon, the deal has nothing to do with cleaning your floors. What it seems to be about—expanding the company’s reach further into people’s lives—should trouble everyone.
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The iRobot deal follows a known Amazon strategy, one that Jeff Bezos has admitted to in the past: using mergers to buy its way to dominance. (I asked Amazon if this is what it’s doing with Roomba, but the company did not comment.) Several companies make and sell robotic vacuums, including brands like Shark and others. But Roomba is the household name, so ubiquitous that it’s shorthand for every other robot vacuum available. By simply taking over the company that makes the most popular product in the industry, Amazon can grow its monopoly without actually having to out-innovate and out-compete its rivals.
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This merger isn’t just about controlling the robot-vacuum industry, or even about smart-home devices. Owning Roomba would give the world’s most dominant spy-tech maker yet another portal into our homes and lives. It could map where we live, what we own, and what it should be selling to its hundreds of millions of captured customers.
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These devices have given Amazon incredible access to people’s daily lives. The company has a documented history of leveraging the data its vast home-tech network captures in order to grow—and to expand its monopoly power. For example, Amazon has for years used Alexa’s algorithm to steer customers toward Amazon’s own products. Ring monitors and records every interaction with a customer's doorbell, including every doorbell buzz and every movement in proximity to the outside of the door, and congressional investigators found that “acquiring Ring and Blink was in part to expand and reinforce [Amazon’s] market power for its other business lines.”
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The latest Roomba models capture information that Amazon, at the moment, doesn’t have access to. iRobot’s new operating system maps the floor plan and contents of the spaces in which it operates. The vacuums are now equipped with a camera so it can respond to commands like “Clean in front of the couch.” But that means it knows what kind of couch you have—and crib, and dog bed, and so on. If the deal goes through, Amazon will too, whether or not you wanted Amazon to know that stuff. (Amazon did not comment on how it would use data collected by Roombas.)
If this deal feels bad and intrusive, that’s because it is. People buy a Roomba because they want something that will clean their floors. Most folks don’t want a spinning, camera-equipped data vacuum taking stock of their home and its contents, then beaming that information back to the most powerful retail monopoly on Earth.
Amazon's entire business strategy is about expanding its monopoly status and then extracting rents from its customers.
I really hope that Lina Khan and the rest of the apparatus of the state comes down Amazon and Jeff Bezos in full wrath of God mode.
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