Wyze Robot Vacuum

This robot vacuum from Wyze doesn’t have a built-in camera. Instead it has room mapping sensors and LIDAR lasers. These are generally a safer bet than cameras in your home. However, researchers found that LIDAR robot vacuums can be hacked to and used to spy on voice conversations, even without a microphone.

This vacuum does connect to WiFi and shares some data back to Wyze. Fortunately, on the privacy side of things, Wyze seems pretty good. There’s nothing in Wyze’s privacy policy that worries us overly much. We like that Wyze does not sell your personal information. They say they can share de-identified or aggregated information with third parties, which is pretty common and not too worrisome. Although it’s a good time to remind you that it’s been found to be pretty easy to de-anonymize some types of data and track down an individual’s patterns, especially with location data. And they do some targeted advertising with data they collect.

One concern we did find with Wyze is in December 2019, they suffered a huge data leak that exposed the personal information of 2.4 million security camera users when they left a database unprotected for 22 days. That is not good, not good at all. Fortunately, Wyze jumped on fixing their epic goof, which is what you want to see when something like this happens. Hopefully, Wyze won’t have any more data leaks, especially ones involving any data this robot vacuum collects about your home.

What’s the worst that could happen? It would be pretty terrible to have your cool LIDAR robot vacuum hacked, the LIDAR used to “listen” into top secret conversations about your banking account numbers and travel plans, and then bad guys use those hacked conversations to rob you blind. That is very unlikely to happen. Still, it seems it’s not impossible.