Robot vacuum can be so much fun and a total relief for the simple cleans that you don’t want to bother yourself with so that you can move on to more important tasks in life. Scheduled cleans and remote operation allows them to pull a lot off for their size (when you aren’t troubleshooting them getting stuck somewhere).
However, they may also be listening in on your conversations as well. Hackers are capable of making use of what is being called a “LidarPhone” hack that would allow them to remotely tap into models with LiDAR sensors and listen to collected audio signals via the sensor. Everything from private conversations to various noises or music within the area can be sampled.
The process is explained in detail by researchers at both the University of Maryland, College Park as well as the National University of Singapore. Thankfully, it isn’t an easy task and someone has to have access to your network initially in order to compromise the vacuum and make it all happen. Regardless, it is another lesson on how sensitive IoT can be. Smart home everything continues to become so fascinating as we evolve to new technologies to help make day to day life easier. However, if man can make it, man can break it. So there is always a dark side to everything just waiting to be compromised sadly.
If you like to geek out with things like this, we do advise reading the report that the researchers assembled as it is quite informative.
