An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.
They do process mapping locally, there’s no reason for a remote connection other than remote control outside your LAN and data collection.
My vacuum running Valetudo works fine with no internet connection, mapping and all.
I suspected it shouldn’t need the connection, but I’ve never had one of those, so, I didn’t know for sure.
It’s just that the article gets in a tangent about how the device might require offloading that to online servers… and then it’s obviously not the case since the guy made it work offline.