New Delhi, Oct. 27 -- It's a scene straight out of a surveillance thriller: a small, whirring robot vacuum in your living room quietly broadcasting constant streams of data - maps, telemetry, and even the very layout of your house to servers continents away. That's not speculative fiction, but a real-world finding from technologist Harishankar Narayanan, who reverse-engineered his iLife A11 smart vacuum and shared the unsettling details on his blog Small World, as reported by Futurism.

Narayanan's curiosity kicked in after noticing persistent outbound traffic from his device just days into use. Using standard network monitoring, he uncovered an unending string of logs and app data pinging back to the manufacturer, with no clear user cons...