The Vacuum of Trust...

The Vacuum of Trust. OR: When Your Smart Home Gets Too Curious.

Do you remember when vacuum cleaners were just... vacuum cleaners? Loud, indiscriminate suction machines that ate your socks and occasionally your dignity, but at least they didn't generate a floor plan of your house and phone it home to a server somewhere in Shenzhen. Not anymore.

Azdoufal didn't set out to become the world's most unlikely vacuum cleaner voyeur. He just wanted to control his DJI Romo robovac with a PS5 controller, because apparently that's the kind of thing we do for fun now and which I lowkey wish I'd thought of first. But when his homebrew app connected to DJI's servers, something stupid happened: roughly 7,000 robot vacuums, scattered across 24 countries, all started treating him like their new best mate.

He could control them. He could watch through their cameras. He could see them mapping rooms, generating 2D floor plans of complete strangers' homes, reporting back every three seconds with their serial numbers, battery life, and what they'd seen along the way.

"I found my device was just one in an ocean of devices," he says.

I spend months foaming my keyboard case to dampen unwanted sound, meanwhile my vacuum's been broadcasting my domestic arrangements in 1080p with zero acoustic treatment. Ain't that the life.

 

The THOCK of Insecurity

Here's the thing that makes my keys feel slightly sticky: Azdoufal wasn't even trying to hack anything. He didn't brute-force passwords or exploit zero-days. He simply extracted his own vacuum's authentication token. Its a digital key that says "yes, I own this device", and DJI's servers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that token granted him access to his device along with everybody else's devices. SMART.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my appliances remain appliances, and not reporting my every movement to who knows what, where, why and when. I like my keyboards hot-swappable; not my private conversations. The moment my appliances start reporting on me, I get the same feeling as an unlubed Cherry MX Brown. Something deeply unsettling.

When The Verge tested this, they gave Azdoufal nothing but a 14-digit serial number from their review unit. Within minutes, he was watching that vacuum generate an accurate floor plan of a colleague's house; the correct shape and size of each room, transmitted from a laptop in a different country. All because DJI's "permission validation" was about as robust as a split keyboard held together with prayers and twine.

The only thing worse than a stabilised spacebar rattle is discovering your hoover's been live-streaming your evening activities to someone in Minsk.

 

VibeCoding for the Masses

DJI isn't the first smart home company to treat security like an optional firmware update. In 2024, hackers took over Ecovacs robot vacuums to chase pets and yell racial slurs. In 2025, South Korean government agencies reported that Dreame's X50 Ultra had a flaw letting hackers view camera feeds in real time. Another Ecovacs and a Narwal robovac could let intruders view and steal photos.

It's not just vacuums, of course. I still won't buy a Wyze camera because that company tried to sweep a remote access vulnerability under the rug instead of warning customers. Anker's Eufy lied about its security, too; though to their credit, they eventually came clean. Sunlight is a good disinfectant it turns out.

But here's what gets my spacebar stuck: we've somehow normalised these devices and this behaviour. It's only going to happen more now industry is vibecoding security with one decent engineer and the tea lady.

 

The Cost of Convenience

Let's be clear: this isn't about being a Luddite. I run a business built on selling premium mechanical keyboards over the internet. I understand the value of smart tools, automation, and cloud connectivity. My workshop has more networked devices than some small offices.

But there's a difference between choosing to connect something and having connectivity shoved down your throat like a hot dog you never asked for. When you buy a DJI Romo, or any smart home device, really you're not just buying a device. You're buying into an ecosystem, a terms-of-service agreement you didn't read, and a data pipeline that flows in directions you never considered. This vacuum's got better telemetry than my custom keymap, and considerably more invasive modifiers.

DJI's response to all this was... instructive. When Azdoufal and The Verge contacted them, the company claimed they'd fixed the vulnerability. They issued a statement saying "the issue was resolved last week". That was about thirty minutes before Azdoufal demonstrated live access to thousands of devices including their review unit. It's the kind of corporate communication that makes group buy delays seem refreshingly honest.

The company now admits to "a backend permission validation issue" that could have theoretically let anyone with a token see live video from thousands of homes. They say actual occurrences were "extremely rare." But that's not really the point, is it? The point is that the architecture allowed it. The point is that a single hobbyist, reverse-engineering protocols with Claude Code, could access more vacuums than most people have seen in their lifetime.

I've always said the thock vs. clack debate was missing something. Now I realise it was the subtle whirrr-click of a compromised LiDAR mapping my living room.

 

The Architecture of Distrust

Here's the uncomfortable truth: this problem isn't going away. If anything, it's accelerating. The "smart home" industry is in a race to the bottom that makes the keyboard market look like a model of restraint. Every device needs an app. Every app needs cloud connectivity. Every cloud connection is a potential doorway.

And we, the consumers, are complicit. We want the convenience. We want to check if the dog's been fed from our office desk. We want our thermostats to learn our schedules and our lights to sync with our sleep cycles. We trade privacy for convenience because the trade-off feels abstract. That is until someone in Barcelona is watching your wife move wrestling with you on the living room furniture through your vacuum cleaner's eye.

My keyboard is meant to be the only thing eye-catching on my desk. I didn't agree to give a Chinese-made camera-bot a front-row seat to my keyboard ASMR sessions.

DJI says they've fixed the vulnerabilities now. Azdoufal says they haven't fixed all of them. There are still issues he's not disclosing until the company has more time to patch. The company's committed to addressing them "within weeks."

Weeks. While thousands of vacuums continue whirring through people's homes, potentially broadcasting their layouts, their routines, their lives.

 

Trust but Verify

I trust my keyboard to keep my notes mine. My DJI, meanwhile, has been measuring the exact dimensions of my home with the enthusiasm of someone hunting for my home address to send me turds. Again.

The mechanical keyboard community understands something that the smart home industry seems to have forgotten: trust is earned, not assumed. We don't buy keyboards from random Alibaba sellers and expect them to last. We research. We read reviews. We understand that "wireless" means compromises, that "hot-swap" means potential socket failures, that "budget" usually means corners were cut somewhere.

But when it comes to the devices that map our homes, record our voices, and watch our families, we've somehow suspended that critical thinking. We assume that TLS encryption means our data is safe (it doesn't, it just means it's encrypted in transit, not that the people on the other end can't read it). We assume that big companies have big security teams (sometimes true, often not and increasingly less so). We assume that our lives aren't interesting enough to spy on (statistically true, but beside the point).

 

So How do We Act About This?

I'm not going to tell you to throw all your smart devices in the bin. That's not practical, and it's not the point. The point is to be aware. To ask questions. To treat every connected device with the same scepticism you'd bring to a Group Buy from a first-time designer with no track record.

Questions worth asking:

• Does this device really need a camera/microphone to do its job?
• Where does my data go, and who can access it?
• What happens when the company gets bought, goes bust, or just stops caring?
• Can I use this device locally, without cloud connectivity?
• Has this company been honest about past security issues, or have they swept them under the rug?

The answers might not change your behaviour. But at least you'll be making informed choices, not just sleepwalking into someone else's surveillance architecture. Our new champions and hero's arent Odysseus or Achilles; its folks like Azdoufal using his PS5 controller. In his dressing gown. With tea.

So next time you're lubing your switches at 2am, spare a thought. Somewhere, someone might be watching you drink the last of the milk out of the carton in your underwear by the romantic light of the fridge... At least our keyboards aren't judging your cable management. Well, not yet anyway.