Amazon Continues Its Mission to Turn Your Home Into a Data Farm

The company acquires Roomba to hoover up more data

Not content with the information it already has on us — i.e. far more than it should — Amazon is stepping up its efforts to turn our homes into data farms.

The plan to ‘smart-ify’ our homes has been nearly a decade in the making. It began in 2013 when Amazon acquired Ivona Software, a voice recognition startup. In 2014, they launched the Echo smart speaker, and thanks partly to the Ivona Software it had purchased, “Hey, Alexa” was born. As adoption of these devices increased (Amazon regularly gave them away from nearly nothing to help), the company started acquiring. In the following years, it picked up smart security camera startup Blink for $90 million and the smart doorbell startup Ring for a massive $1 billion. Then in 2021, it launched Astro, a household robot that is basically a Walmart Wall-E, devoid of any personality, charm… and arms. What can it do? Well, it can follow users from room to room, connecting to other Alexa-controlled devices in the household.

And in continuation of its quest to complete the collection of “things that don’t really need to be smart things,” Amazon recently announced it would acquire iRobot, the maker of the popular Roomba smart vacuum, for around $1.7 billion.