Sophos Cloud Optix
Jibo is a recently announced, crowd-fundable, simply adorable “social” Internet of Things robot whose fortes are emotional communication with you and your loved ones, and massive data collection.
He’s poised to smile, dance, and giggle his way into our hearts, our homes, and hopefully not into the lucrative position of pawning data about where we like to shop.
The robot, which looks like a Furby with one golfball-sized eyeball that’s had its ears and fur boiled off, has the functionality and emoting capability of a tripping iPad.
Jibo is a hub for learning, entertaining, text/email/voice message conveying, reading your recipes out loud, taking photos of your family that you actually get to be in, facial recognition to enable that, and artificial intelligence that tailors its answers to you, albeit in a robotic tone.
Jibo can hide with your children under their blanket fort and read them stories, morphing its spherical eyeball into illustrations and chirping in cartoonish alarm when the blanket collapses on them.
“Oh, there you are,” it will exult when the tots re-emerge, which is more comforting than fictional robots, which are always trying to go back in time to kill our parents or which keep trying to feed us toast.
The non-lethal, no-sharp-edges android comes from Cynthia Breazeal, the famed roboticist at MIT’s Media Lab.
Her new startup, Jibo Inc., kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to launch Jibo on Wednesday.
According to IEEE Spectrum, Breazeal decided to launch via crowdfunding because she and her crew can’t possibly explore all of Jibo’s possibilities by themselves and therefore are inviting developers in to create new apps – or skills, in the case of a robot.
Like, say, picking locks, like in Robot & Frank.
Jibo is, in other words, a development platform.
Just like Google, Apple and Samsung want to be at the heart of all that juicy data flowing from health and fitness apps, or like how Google bought Nest to find out things that might include, for example, when we’re home, Jibo’s going to be merrily gyrating to music while grinding all sorts of personal data about us.
Tom, one of the commenters on IEEE Spectrum’s story, posted a list of interesting questions, some of which were – I assume?! – tongue-in-cheek, plus some true chin-rubbers, including:
- How is my privacy going to be protected with a robot that has access to all my devices?
- Can the recordings, videos, and pictures this robot takes be utilized against me in a court of law?
- Can Jibo be hacked?
- Is this a tool for the NSA to gather facial recognition on everyone?
- Did the government have anything to do with design, operations, and funding of Jibo?
- If not the govt. – who are the financiers of Jibo?
Jibo’s makers have taken privacy into consideration. Or at least, that’s what its FAQ says, though details aren’t forthcoming as of yet:
HOW IS MY PRIVACY PROTECTED?
Guarding our users' privacy is something we take very seriously. We work hard to protect your information from unauthorized access and have designed policies and controls to safeguard the collection, use, and disclosure of your information.
The company told me that it plans to post a response to questions about security on its blog soon.
In the meantime, pre-orders for these puppies are now being taken, at $499 for a home version and $599 for a developer edition.
Planning to get one? Or planning to wait until you hear a bit more about the privacy guards than the two-sentence FAQ?
Image courtesy of myjibo.com.
Adorable. Right.
I hope we don’t ever reach the point where our only friends are manufactured. Also, just because something is cute and insipid doesn’t lessen its potential to be abused, causing us more harm than good.
Much like the little robot that was built for the original Nintendo back in the day, this probably wont last too long. Its just another expensive novelty that will end up collecting more dust than data in the long run.
I found it to be more than a little bit creepy even before considering the security issues of it having access to pretty much everything including the bit where it orders food for you.
People are bound to want one in just about every room so if they were compromised, it would become a massive tool for thieves to know where and when to break into houses.
Also things like voice controls aren’t even 100% reliable, you could easily have the thing ordering you two hundred pizzas without any foul play involved.
People should get a dog instead of these talking cans. Technology is OK, I’m not against it at all, but we should let Nature play its role. Of course a dog is not going to order pizza on the phone, but you’ll never feel real love and tenderness from a piece of plastic and silicon.
i no this wont happen and i maybe just watch to many scary movies but what if it turns evil or what if its the government watching us.?
I do not believe this JIBO, creature is a good idea. If you can tell it to take pictures, first of all it can HEAR you…. and it can SEE you…. And no one thinks this is wrong?
This thing can take pictures or videos of you at will, but who’s will is it? And who knows if it is not sending those pictures to the government. Maybe this is another ‘cute’ way keep tabs on us.
Also, it can access you devices! It could easily spam your pay pal or bank account. Also, what if it is hacked? What kind of information would be at that hackers fingertips? And what could they use it for?
I do not support the manufacturing or purchasing of this product. You will NOT be finding JIBO in my home.