Amazon’s latest acquisition is iRobot, makers of the Roomba vacuums, for a cool $1.7 billion. Roomba has the biggest slice of the worldwide robot vacuum market at about 46 percent, more than twice its nearest competitor. Of course, that robot also collects data, which Amazon will now have.
The size of your home may not sound important, but to a datadriven company like Amazon, it is. The location, size, layout, and even flooring materials of your home build into a useful—and saleable— set of marketing data. Allowing internet-connected devices into your home means you’ll build a file of useful marketing data that doesn’t belong to you.