There should be people who like to vacuum. For most, however, it is a rather chore. So it’s no wonder that devices that take at least a part of it from you have become a bestseller. Robot vacuum cleaners have also been able to wipe damp for a number of years, many have a suction station so that you don’t have to empty the little helpers after each run. One of the leading manufacturers is iRobot. His boss Colin Angle assembled robots at university and is now selling his company to the Internet retailer Amazon for $1.7 billion.
Devices like Ring’s talking Alexa boxes or smart doorbells aren’t necessarily Amazon’s core business. But on the one hand, many expect that the area will grow strongly. IRobot boss Colin Angle, for example, sees aging societies as a large sales market. “We need robots so that people can live independently for longer,” he told the SZ a few years ago. On the other hand, Amazon has an even more important reason for this investment: data.
Cheap vacuum robots drive around blindly, knock them somewhere, turn them in a random direction. With this principle, they eventually manage to completely cover a room. More expensive devices such as those from iRobot, on the other hand, use cameras, lasers and sensors to orient themselves in space. Since they usually also communicate with the manufacturers’ servers, they know the floor plans of the apartments. Data protectionists consider this problematic, even if Amazon promises not to sell its customers’ data to third parties.
In any case, the picture that the internet retailer gets from its customers would be pretty comprehensive with the purchase of the vacuum cleaner manufacturer. Anyone who uses the smart doorbells, Alexa loudspeakers and possibly also a networked vacuum cleaner provides the company with a lot of data about their private environment. In addition, networked devices often offer a target for digital attacks. The more such devices are connected, the greater the risk that one of them can be attacked via a vulnerability.
However, the deal is not yet complete and it could even be that it will not come to that in the first place. Because – as the news agency Reuters reports – there are legitimate doubts as to whether the American antitrust authorities will allow Amazon to buy iRobot. The group has already assured that the devices may continue to be sold by other providers. In addition, they would also be able to be controlled in the future by smart home devices from other providers such as Google or Apple.
But antitrust experts like the lawyer Ethan Glass quoted by Reuters still consider it very likely that the FTC, the US antitrust authority, will examine the matter in an in-depth procedure. In the worst case, this could result in a ban on the deal. That wouldn’t just be bad for Amazon because it would have to pay iRobot nearly $100 million. Above all, the group is interested in big business that you don’t want to miss out on: “We believe,” says Dave Limp, head of the equipment division, “that in five to ten years every household will have at least one robot that has a central robot role in daily life.”