When you bring technology into your home, do you know who else you're letting in? A few days ago, a software engineer tried to build a custom app to drive his DJI Romo vacuum with a PlayStation controller. Instead of connecting to just his robot, DJI's servers handed him live camera feeds, microphone audio, floor plans, and locations from roughly 7,000 Romos across 24 countries.
He didn't hack anything. He didn't break into a server. He used his own device's login credentials. The server just… gave him everyone else's robots too.
He collected over 100,000 messages in nine minutes.
How does that even happen?
Let that sink in. 7,000 homes. Live cameras. Live microphones. Floor plans that show the layout of your house. All from a robot that drives through your bedroom, your kids' rooms, past your front door. Every. Single. Day.
All because one guy wanted to drive his vacuum with a game controller.
This Isn't the First Time
Here's what makes this worse: we've seen this exact pattern before.
In 2024, hackers took over Ecovacs Deebot X2 vacuums across multiple US cities, yelling racial slurs through the speakers and chasing people's dogs around their living rooms. That vulnerability had been disclosed at a hacking conference months earlier. Ecovacs told customers they "do not need to worry excessively" and shipped a patch that didn't fully fix the problem.
Now DJI. Impressive hardware, security that didn't match.
DJI's data was encrypted in transit — that wasn't the problem. The problem was simpler and scarier: their server checked that you were a valid user, but never checked which robot was yours. Any valid login could access every robot on the network, turning one set of credentials into a master key to the entire fleet.
DJI pushed two patches and called the exposure limited, but the flaw was there for anyone with a valid account to find. At the time this went public, you could still bypass a robot's camera PIN.
There are 54 million US households with at least one smart home device, and that number grows every year. Everyone who brings one into their home is tying the security of their family to the engineering quality of the manufacturer — and as we've now seen twice, that quality can be terrifyingly fragile.
As technology continues to evolve, how do we make sure that we are trusting the right ones?
We've Seen This Up Close
Before Matic, our team came from Google Nest. We saw firsthand how IoT companies — not just overseas, American ones too — treat privacy and security as an afterthought. The marketing always sounds the same, but the rigor behind it often doesn't match.
That stuck with us. We couldn't unsee it — families bringing cameras and microphones into their homes, trusting that someone, somewhere, had built the security properly, when we knew how often that wasn't the case.
That's why we built Matic. We wanted to build a better robot vacuum — but we knew that started with making privacy and security an absolute priority for any device that enters someone's home, especially one with a camera.
We Did Something Different
When we started Matic, we made a decision that a lot of people thought was overkill: we would build our remote access system so that even we couldn't see your data. Not "we promise not to look," not "we have policies in place" — structurally, by design, cannot see it.
We built our remote connection system, called Portal, from scratch and then open-sourced the whole thing so anyone can read the code.
Here's how it works in plain terms:
Your login only works with your robot. Every connection between your phone and your robot is locked to that specific robot with a unique cryptographic key. There's no wildcard and no "give me everything" — your credentials talk to your robot and nothing else. The DJI-style failure is impossible, not because we have better policies, but because the system doesn't allow it. Even we can't see your data. Your phone and your robot create a private encrypted connection between them — think of it like two people speaking a language only they understand, in a room full of strangers. Our server is one of those strangers. It passes the data along, but it can't read any of it. Even if someone broke into our cloud, all they'd find is noise.
Your sensitive data never leaves your robot. Your camera feeds, audio, detailed home layout, and cleaning history all live on the robot itself, processed by its onboard computer. If you choose to share diagnostic data, it's limited to basic telemetry and rudimentary map data, and it's always your choice. We never built a big database in the cloud full of everyone's homes, so there's nothing to breach because there's nothing there.
When you're home, nothing touches the internet. When your phone and robot are on the same Wi-Fi, they talk directly with no cloud and no relay. Remote access lets you connect from anywhere, but your connection is always locked to your robot and no one else's.
Why We Open-Sourced It
Most systems in this industry are closed, and these vulnerabilities tend to get discovered by hobbyists and security researchers poking around rather than by manufacturers catching them first.
We put our code on GitHub for the world to see because "trust us" isn't good enough — not for something that drives a camera through your house every day. Anyone can inspect it, and anyone can verify it does what we say it does.
Security through transparency, not secrecy.
The Bigger Picture
Here's what we believe: privacy isn't a feature you add — it's a design decision you make on day one, or you never make it at all.
You can't bolt on "we can't see your data" after you've already built a system where you can, and you can't add proper security after you've shipped a system that treats every login as a master key. These are choices you make at the foundation or you don't make them at all. We made them at the foundation eight years ago, before we shipped a single robot.
The quest for perfect security is never-ending, and no system is immune to bugs. But when something goes wrong — and in any system, eventually something will — the question is how bad can it get.
In today's news, one login accessed 7,000 homes with live cameras, live microphones, and full floor plans of children's bedrooms and front doors. In ours, one login accesses one robot. That's all it can ever access.
That's not an accident — it's a choice we made from the very beginning, and it will always be our number one priority.
This Is Why Matic Exists
We started Matic because we believed you shouldn't have to choose between a robot that works and a robot that respects your privacy. You can have both, if you're willing to do the hard work of building it right from the start.
Today's news — again — is a reminder of why that matters.
The Portal source code is on GitHub. Matic is available at maticrobots.com. Every robot is designed and assembled in Mountain View, California.
A robot vacuum isn't good or evil. But the choices made in building one can be.