If anyone is interested in these things mine has been great for 5 years now and would recommend a lidar based one at a minimum. Got a Wyze for my now wife on sale for $75 (a steal) 1-2 years ago and it’s a cost reduced update of mine but performs just as well as mine and I think may use US servers (being a US company?)
The biggest problem to me is that some of the rooting requires opening the decide, depending on the model you might be disassembling a lot.
It's scary when these things cost 300-500 dollars.
I really wish device manufacturers made it easier for people to be able to change the firmware of the devices they've purchased.
A few weeks ago I bought another unit, it's not supported by valetudo yet but the previous model was. So my thought was that soon enough this new will be supported as well; they don't really seem to be super different when it comes to features (though there were some features I needed, which is why I got the new model instead of the older one).
At this point, I am willing to sacrifice privacy for the cleaning.
Sorry, but that's more work than I'm willing to do to prevent the vacuum from hitting CN servers.
I would rather see our government (US) do more to enforce data privacy laws.
