[gedy]

These darn things don't need to be "cloud enabled", or even wifi. Please make them Bluetooth, etc only.

These dopey use cases of needing to trigger a cleaning while miles away have always seemed like a stretch.

[Syonyk]

Right. But the actual use case of being able to sell your home's floorplan and general cleaning schedule/behaviors/etc to advertisers requires cloud functionality, so you need some fig leaf to cover up the requirement...

I agree, local only would be great. But that's not aligned with the "sell a product once, sell the data collected forever!" model that most modern consumer tech products operate on.

[amelius]

Even if they're Bluetooth-only: AdTech will invent some way to send Ethernet packets over it, sooner than you might expect.

[accrual]

Maybe a step further for privacy: a physical "config mode" toggle on top of the vacuum that enables the BlueTooth radio for a point-to-point connection with the phone app, then toggle it back when you're done. Wouldn't prevent the vacuum from caching data during its work and sending it when in config mode though, I suppose.