Hmm, I think as someone who doesn't own one of these vacuums you're jumping to quite a few conclusions about how they operate, and how the businesses that sell these devices operate.

1. I know of no manufacturer who requires you to connect your robot vac to their cloud. They function perfectly without being connected, and will continue to do so if the company goes up in flames over night.

> I can't play some games because they had DRM for servers that no longer exist. It really sucks.

DRM is very different to a company providing me with cloud access to information about my vacuum cleaner. DRM restricts (or "manages") your rights to use a product. The smart functionality is additional functionality they're offering. I don't have to use it if I don't want to, my vacuum isn't going to stop functioning because their servers go offline.

> Additionally, I'm more asking for transparency and choice, rather than "no cloud features". I just see people trying to justify forced cloud features as "your privacy doesn't matter".

No one is forcing anything upon you. There are plenty of "dumb" robots that don't have cloud functionality but will navigate around your home, buy one if you prefer it. Even still, the ones that do have cloud functionality, that functionality is used entirely at your own discretion.

2. You're assuming you know better than the company about how to offer this functionality.

You're suggesting the robot vac could just store the information on itself and when I'm not home I'll connect to the robot to retrieve said information. Am I supposed to set up port forwarding so I can connect to the robot vac from the outside world? What if I don't want my robot vac exposed to the outside world, which by the way, I don't.

The alternative would be that it pings home (a server somewhere) every 3 seconds or so, in order to see if I just decided I want to communicate with the robot. Then to setup something like a direct web socket connection and hope the routers along the way play nice. Doesn't sound like the best idea for battery life.

What about when my robot vac gets stuck (as previously described) and its battery inevitably runs out? Which by the way, is precisely what happens. Then how will I query where my robot is now that it's flat stuck under some piece of furniture somewhere around the house?

What about if the power goes out? What about when my home Internet goes down?

3. Security and convenience are almost always at odds. It's a trade off. Put your money where your mouth is and chose a manufacturer who aligns well with what you prefer.

I can think of a tonne of ways I could improve my Macbook's security, they're not particularly convenient though. For example, instead of Apple requiring me to connect to their servers to get updates (how dare they?), why don't they just have an option to mail the updates out on USB? That'd improve my security... it sure as hell doesn't sound convenient for anyone involved though.

There might be some super elaborate way (port forwarding, wall-powered base station charger is a computer etc.) that allows me to have similar functionality to what I've presently got available to me. However, it's not likely to be as convenient as the existing "cloud" solutions.

4. Just because a company has your information doesn't mean the company is evil.

Just because a company is storing data on a server somewhere doesn't automatically mean they're planning to come rob your house. Read their policies, it's highly unlikely that any vacuum company having a rough idea of your floor plan is going to negatively impact your existence on this planet in any way - unless you're getting high blood pressure over the issue for some reason (which I'd say is on you). I'm pretty sure my robot vac provider doesn't even have my address on file, my rough floor plan isn't of much use to the nefarious type.

On the other hand, if they're using my robot's navigation information to improve the robot, so that it doesn't get stuck on my shiny dinning room chair legs, or clothes left on the floor of my walk-in robe, then I'm all for it.