Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook

Shortly after MIT Technology Review contacted iRobot for comment on the photos last fall, the company terminated its contract with Scale AI. Nevertheless, in a LinkedIn post in response to our story, iRobot CEO Colin Angle did not acknowledge the mere fact that these images, and the faces of test users, were visible to human gig workers was a reason for concern. Rather, he wrote, making such images available was actually necessary to train iRobot's object recognition algorithms: "How do our robots get so smart? It starts during the development process, and as part of that, through the collection of data to train machine learning algorithms." Besides, he pointed out, the images came not from customers but from "paid data collectors and employees" who had signed consent agreements.