Your Robot Mower Is Mapping Your Yard. The Privacy Policy Says Nothing About It.

A Chinese robotics company called MOVA just became the world's top seller of AI-powered lawn mowers with dual cameras. The award it won is real. The numbers check out. The robot's camera system automatically maps your yard and updates that map every time it runs. That same system is also a permanent home-surveillance platform, and MOVA's privacy policy says nothing about any of it.

MOVA sells its products primarily through Amazon across Europe and is beginning US distribution. Its ViAX Pro robotic mower uses two forward-facing cameras and artificial intelligence to detect obstacles up to 50 meters away while it cuts. The system builds a persistent map of your yard that gets more detailed with each mowing session. According to Frost & Sullivan, which named MOVA the global leader in AI binocular robotic lawn mowers by sales volume for the period from April 2025 to March 2026, the ViAX series has topped Amazon best-seller lists in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. Cumulative global shipments reached 300,000 units as of March 2026, with year-on-year growth of roughly 500 percent.

The Frost & Sullivan award is the headline. The privacy policy is the story.

MOVA's US privacy policy covers website data collection and account management but does not address the video or camera data collected by the robot mower, cloud processing, EU AI Act compliance, or data retention for the mapping system. The company did not respond to a request for comment on its data-handling practices. The policy makes no mention of whether mapping imagery is transmitted to MOVA's servers, how long it is stored, or whether it is used for any purpose beyond operating the device. The EU AI Act, which took effect in stages starting in 2024, requires operators of certain AI systems to disclose data-processing practices, retention periods, and the legal basis for processing. MOVA's policy says none of this.

The data at stake is not trivial. A robot mower that maps your yard once has a rough sketch. After 50 runs, it has a detailed floor plan of your property: entry points, garden layout, the hours you keep. That level of spatial detail about private homes has commercial value. It could inform targeted advertising, be sold to property-data brokers, or be accessed in a security breach. As of March 2026, US robotic mower penetration sat below 3 percent, meaning the market is still small but growing fast. Globally, the robotic mower category represented $2.6 billion out of a $30 billion-plus outdoor power equipment market, with annual unit sales of roughly 1.2 to 1.3 million, less than 5 percent penetration. The addressable base of mapped yards is set to expand dramatically.

MOVA is not the only company in this space with a patchy privacy record. In 2022, Eufy — a brand owned by the same parent company as MOVA's direct competitor Ecovacs — was caught uploading footage to cloud servers despite marketing its cameras as local-only storage. Security researchers discovered that footage was being transmitted without user knowledge or consent, and without the encryption the product claimed to provide. In 2024, security researchers at DEF CON demonstrated a chain of vulnerabilities in Ecovacs Deebot vacuums that allowed remote takeover and live access to the camera and microphone without any indicator light on the device; the same flaws affected Ecovacs lawn-care robots. Separately, roughly 11,000 deployed Yarbo robotic lawn mowers had hardcoded passwords, persistent backdoors, and firmware flaws that researchers said would allow remote activation of the mower, override of its emergency stop, access to its camera feed, and extraction of stored WiFi credentials. None of these findings involve MOVA directly, and no independent security audit of MOVA's systems has been published. The company has not disclosed whether it has conducted such an audit internally.

What MOVA has disclosed is what its robots can see. The question its privacy policy does not answer is what happens to that data after the mowing is done.

For now, the mapping data exists, the policy is silent, and 300,000 yards have been mapped. The award is real. The privacy vacuum is the story.