Consumer Advocates Blast ‘Dangerous’ Amazon Bid to Buy Maker of Roomba
Amazon on Friday expanded its capacity to connect to and collect information about consumers’ homes and private lives, announcing its plan to purchase of iRobot Corp., the maker of the popular Roomba vacuum.
The e-commerce giant announced it will acquire the company for $1.7 billion in an all-cash deal, taking control of one of its competitors following Amazon’s release last year of Astro, its own “smart” home assistant, which can move between rooms in a home and recognize faces.
But the purchase, said Robert Weissman, president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, “is not just about Amazon selling another device in its marketplace.”
“It’s about the company gaining still more intimate details of our lives to gain unfair market advantage and sell us more stuff,” he said.
Like Amazon’s other home products including Alexa and Ring, Roomba can connect to smartphones and WiFi. The vacuum creates a map of users’ homes so it can tell where furniture and doors are as it cleans floors.
“With Ring, Alexa, and now Roomba, Amazon tracks EVERYTHING that happens inside your house (even who visits you),” said economist and entrepreneur Raoul Pal.
In 2017, iRobot CEO Colin Angle told Reuters that his company was considering selling data collected from customers’ homes by Roombas to companies including Amazon and Google, helping the corporations discern what and how to market products.
The purchase of iRobot comes two weeks after Amazon announced its acquisition of One Medical, a private healthcare provider, for $3.9 billion. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among the critics of the deal, warning Amazon’s foray into medical care would not “provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way” but would only serve to make Amazon founder Jeff Bezos “even richer.”
Originally published at Commondreams.org.
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