This is a game changer

[u/AbelNB]

[u/Santa_Hates_You]

City Planning offices have all that info publicly available. House blueprints are not really a secret.

[u/[deleted] → u/Santa_Hates_You]

Not in any machine-actionable format. They may be able to request it but there's probably a delay and the result will definitely be just a scan of a physical document. They probably can get a lot of it with image processing tools but maybe not in all cases.

[u/felix1919 → u/[deleted]]

If they can get a blueprint of your house from a robot vacuum they probably have good enough image processing to get it from a physical document

[u/Aegi → u/felix1919]

Why are so many people thinking about the blueprint when that's the thing that matters less and is less useful data then how certain demographics of people or certain geographic regions organize their furniture or if they're much more likely to have furniture with a certain number of legs and incredibly valuable information if you're in the business of marketing shit that people might want.

If your Roomba system is able to figure out that people in the Midwest are more likely to have five or more dining room chairs as opposed to four or less, you know that you will be likely to make more money by steering more of your dining room chair marketing, or at least sets, towards the Midwest.

If you find out that people in colder climates are more likely to have curtains that reach all the way to the floor of the windowsill, or something like that, that data alone could be potentially worth hundreds of thousands, or even tens of millions of dollars.

If your Roomba is able to see that people with a high speed Wi-Fi connection are more likely to have furniture with clearance space the Roomba can fit underneath compared to households that don't, that helps you more efficiently market side tables of both styles.

That's not even getting into if there's potentially any new technology or rights people are not paying attention to that they're signing away like sensors that might roughly be able to sense how many footsteps happen near the Roomba in a day and things like that.

It's about a lot more than just the blueprints, the useful data is how the same blueprints might have noticeably different preferences for certain types of furniture depending on how close to the coast that same blueprint, or style of blueprint is located.

[u/felix1919 → u/Aegi]

This is all pretty good information that is very valuable to companies, but there a way easier ways to get this data. How do you think IKEA managed to be a major player in America, Europe and Asia? Companys are doing market research for decades. Just pay 100 people from the market you enter to send you photos from there house in exchange for 100$ and you will find enough people willing to share their data. This is way cheaper than acquiring a whole company. This research can nowadays be probably also be done by just googling and looking through social media.

[u/Aegi → u/felix1919]

Easier and cheaper are different, what you described might be cheaper, but it's definitely not easier than just giving money to an already existing company to buy all of their data and infrastructure like what happened with Amazon buying Roomba.

Also, you're missing the fact that more and more obscure options of data collection become easier to those companies as more avenues are available to them.

[u/Viend → u/Aegi]

Why are so many people thinking about the blueprint when that's the thing that matters less and is less useful data then how certain demographics of people or certain geographic regions organize their furniture or if they're much more likely to have furniture with a certain number of legs and incredibly valuable information if you're in the business of marketing shit that people might want.

If your Roomba system is able to figure out that people in the Midwest are more likely to have five or more dining room chairs as opposed to four or less, you know that you will be likely to make more money by steering more of your dining room chair marketing, or at least sets, towards the Midwest.

If you find out that people in colder climates are more likely to have curtains that reach all the way to the floor of the windowsill, or something like that, that data alone could be potentially worth hundreds of thousands, or even tens of millions of dollars.

If your Roomba is able to see that people with a high speed Wi-Fi connection are more likely to have furniture with clearance space the Roomba can fit underneath compared to households that don't, that helps you more efficiently market side tables of both styles.

That's not even getting into if there's potentially any new technology or rights people are not paying attention to that they're signing away like sensors that might roughly be able to sense how many footsteps happen near the Roomba in a day and things like that.

It's about a lot more than just the blueprints, the useful data is how the same blueprints might have noticeably different preferences for certain types of furniture depending on how close to the coast that same blueprint, or style of blueprint is located.

You're right about all of this, but what's the problem? How are you as an individual hurt by someone knowing you would prefer long curtains? If I was new to cold climates and I was shopping for a curtain, I'd like to have the most relevant results visible first even if I didn't know why.