An engineer named Harishankar N. got curious about his iLife A11 smart vacuum and discovered it was secretly mapping his home and sending that data to China. The device had been using Google Cartographer to build a detailed 3D map of his home and dutifully transmitting every architectural detail to its manufacturers. When he tried to stop the spying, the company remotely bricked his $300 device as punishment.

What followed was a back-and-forth with customer service, where technicians would resurrect the device at the shop, only for it to mysteriously expire again once it was returned home, until they finally gave up.

Harishankar looked at the log files and found the smoking gun: a timestamped kill command that matched his vacuum's time of death. 00:00/02:20 10

Harishankar wasn't goin

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