Wall Street rewarded iRobot for building a surveillance revenue model on home floor plans

Evidence

Nothing is exempt, as products and services from every sector join devices like the Nest thermostat in the competition for surveillance revenues. For example, in July 2017 iRobot’s autonomous vacuum cleaner, Roomba, made headlines when the company’s CEO, Colin Angle, told Reuters about its data-based business strategy for the smart home, starting with a new revenue stream derived from selling floor plans of customers’ homes scraped from the machine’s new mapping capabilities. Angle indicated that iRobot could reach a deal to sell its maps to Google, Amazon, or Apple within the next two years. In preparation for this entry into surveillance competition, a camera, new sensors, and software had already been added to Roomba’s premier line, enabling new functions, including the ability to build a map while tracking its own location. The market had rewarded iRobot’s growth vision, sending the company’s stock price to 102 in June 2017 from just 35 a year earlier, translating into a market capitalization of 2.5 billion on revenues of 660 million. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 736

Categorization

• SHARE: The Roomba floor-plan selling story is a precise detail worth sending to anyone tracking data brokerage and smart-home economics.
• CANDY: A vacuum cleaner that sells your home’s floor plan to Google is a compact conversation-starter about surveillance capitalism.
• ADDENDUM: The Roomba’s mapping-and-selling plan is a perfect concrete instance of infrastructure being repurposed for surveillance, parallel to how trees get repurposed as infrastructure in ‘Grafting & Growth’.