The Dark Side of 'Smart' Devices: Your Vacuum Cleaner Might Actually Be a Spy

[Rachel_29]

It sounds like a punchline, the idea that a robot vacuum bumping gently around your living room could be watching you. It is not a punchline. Over the past few years, security researchers, journalists and privacy regulators have documented a genuinely uncomfortable pattern across the smart home industry, devices sold purely as convenience appliances routinely collect far more data than their function requires, transmit it to servers most owners never think about, and in several well documented cases have been hijacked by outside attackers to do exactly the surveillance people assumed was impossible. This piece walks through what these devices actually collect, how badly things can go wrong when the security underneath them fails, and what a normal household can realistically do about it without needing a computer science degree.

What your vacuum actually knows about you

Modern robot vacuums build a detailed floor plan of your home as a basic function of navigating it properly, that map typically gets stored in the cloud so you can view cleaning progress from an app, which already means a private layout of your house exists somewhere outside your own network. Higher end models go considerably further. Many current robot vacuums ship with a built-in camera, originally marketed as a way to help the robot avoid pet waste and small obstacles, that camera is also capable of capturing ordinary household photos and video whenever the device is active. In 2022, MIT Technology Review published an investigation into training images gathered by iRobot's Roomba testing program that had ended up on social media, among the images reviewed by reporters was a series of stills showing a young woman on a toilet, and a separate image showing an eight or nine year old boy sprawled across a hallway floor with his face clearly visible. iRobot said the images came from developer versions of its robots used with the informed consent of paid data collectors, not consumer products, but the incident made clear exactly what kind of footage these cameras are capable of capturing inside an ordinary home.

The pattern repeated with a different manufacturer two years later. In October 2024, Australian journalist Julian Fell, working with security researcher Dennis Giese, reported that Ecovacs, one of the largest robot vacuum makers in the world, had left a serious remote vulnerability unpatched for roughly ten months despite Giese having privately reported it in December 2023. Giese demonstrated he could remotely and silently take photographs through a vacuum's camera from more than 100 metres away without physically entering the building, and separately documented that hijacked Ecovacs units elsewhere in the US had been used by other hackers to scream obscenities and racial slurs through their onboard speakers and chase family pets around the house. That same year, Ecovacs also confirmed to ABC News that it was harvesting photos, video and audio from users enrolled in what it called a product improvement program to train its AI models, its privacy policy permitted what researchers described as blanket collection of user data for research purposes, including full 2D and 3D maps of a customer's home, and the consent screen inside the app referenced a details link that, when reporters checked, simply was not present on the page.

None of this is unique to vacuums specifically, it is simply the clearest and most viscerally uncomfortable example of a pattern that runs across the entire smart home category. Smart speakers listen for a wake word continuously and have repeatedly been shown to occasionally record and transmit audio outside that intended window. Smart doorbells and security cameras, ironically the devices most explicitly marketed around safety, have their own long history of unsecured cloud storage and default passwords being exploited to let strangers view live feeds. When Amazon attempted to acquire iRobot, the maker of Roomba, in 2022, roughly twenty organisations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology formally urged regulators to block the deal, warning that combining Roomba's floor plans with Amazon's existing trove of Alexa recordings, Ring doorbell footage and detailed shopping histories represented an urgent threat to consumer privacy. Fight for the Future's director Evan Greer put the underlying concern bluntly, arguing people tend to think of Amazon as an online seller but it is really a surveillance company, and that surveillance is the actual core of its business model. The Federal Trade Commission investigated the deal on competition grounds, and Amazon and iRobot ultimately terminated the merger in January 2024.

There is also a genuine geopolitical dimension layered on top of the privacy concerns. Roborock, which commands roughly half of South Korea's robot vacuum market and controls 60 to 70 percent of the high end segment there, quietly revised its data processing policy in March 2026, adding language stating customer data collected through its app may now be processed inside China, and removing prior language that had specifically promised Korean customer data stayed on US servers. The reversal drew immediate scrutiny given the well documented history of Chinese technology companies facing accusations, and in some cases formal sanctions consideration, over data being made accessible to the Chinese state under that country's national security laws, US senators had separately petitioned the Treasury Department in 2021 to sanction another Chinese smart device company, Tuya, on similar national security grounds.

Beyond spying: the botnet problem

Data collection and camera vulnerabilities are only half of the smart device security story, the other half is what happens once one of these devices gets compromised and turned against the wider internet rather than just its own household. This threat has a specific and well documented history. In 2016, malware researchers at Akamai began tracking a new strain of malicious software called Mirai, which specifically targeted the stripped down Linux operating systems running inside home routers, IP cameras and other embedded devices, most of which shipped with default, unchangeable passwords and never received security updates after leaving the factory. At its peak, Mirai infected more than 600,000 devices worldwide and was used to launch some of the largest distributed denial of service attacks ever recorded at the time, all powered by ordinary household electronics whose owners had no idea their thermostat or baby monitor had become a weapon.

That threat has not gone away, it has scaled up dramatically. Cloudflare mitigated a Mirai based attack peaking at 5.6 terabits per second in October 2024, driven by roughly 13,000 compromised devices. Less than a year later, in the third quarter of 2025, a successor botnet called Aisuru pushed past 29.7 terabits per second, drawing on an estimated 300,000 to 700,000 compromised routers, DVRs and IP cameras, and by November 2025 Microsoft Azure absorbed a single attack from the same botnet family peaking at 15.72 terabits per second, sourced from more than 500,000 IP addresses globally. SonicWall recorded a 124 percent year over year jump in IoT specific attacks in 2024 alone, and separate industry tracking found routers remain the single most compromised device category, accounting for more than 75 percent of all observed IoT attacks, with a substantial share of that traffic still moving in completely unencrypted plaintext simply because many cheap IoT devices lack the processing power to run proper encryption at all. Perhaps most tellingly, a nation state linked botnet called Raptor Train, built on a customised Mirai variant, was found to have operated undetected for four years using a resilient three tiered structure of compromised routers, cameras and network storage devices, illustrating that IoT botnets are no longer purely the domain of opportunistic criminals chasing DDoS-for-hire profits, they have become genuine long term infrastructure for state sponsored actors seeking persistent access.

What you can actually do about it

None of this means the sensible response is throwing every smart device in the bin, but it does mean treating your home network with the same basic hygiene you would apply to any other computer connected to the internet. The single most effective and least technical step is separating your smart devices from your primary network entirely, most modern home routers support a guest network or a dedicated IoT network as a standard built-in feature, putting vacuums, cameras, speakers and smart plugs on that separate network means that even if one of them gets compromised, an attacker sitting inside it cannot easily reach the laptop or phone where your actual sensitive data lives. Change every default password on every device the moment you set it up, this single habit alone would have prevented the overwhelming majority of the Mirai botnet's original spread, since the malware worked specifically by trying a short list of common factory default credentials against internet connected devices. Turn off any camera or microphone feature you do not genuinely need, most robot vacuum apps let you disable video transmission or delete cloud stored maps entirely while keeping basic navigation working. Actually read the specific data collection toggle in the setup app rather than accepting the default, the Ecovacs case specifically involved an opt-in program, meaning users who paid attention to that one screen could decline it, though the buried and broken link to further details makes clear how little manufacturers want that scrutiny to actually happen. And keep firmware updated wherever the manufacturer actually provides it, a meaningful share of the exploited vulnerabilities cited in ongoing botnet research were patched by the manufacturer years ago and remain exploitable purely because the affected devices were never updated by their owners.

The uncomfortable broader lesson sitting underneath all of this is that convenience and surveillance have become genuinely difficult to separate in the modern smart home, a vacuum cannot navigate your house without mapping it, a camera cannot avoid the dog's mess without seeing what else is in the room, and a company offering a free or discounted product frequently recoups that cost by monetising the data the device collects along the way. None of that makes these devices worthless, but it does mean the burden of basic digital hygiene, network segmentation, password changes and reading the one privacy toggle that actually matters, now genuinely extends to your vacuum cleaner, and treating that as a mildly absurd inconvenience rather than a real household security task is precisely the assumption that let the last decade of smart home privacy failures happen in the first place.