Dig this: There’s a new Dyson vacuum cleaner that makes a phone call to the manufacturer when it needs spare parts. As the London Sun reports:

The gizmo alerts the user if it has broken down or needs a replacement part.

The owner then dials the number of the Dyson call centre and holds the telephone receiver to the vacuum cleaner.

The machine transmits a message telling engineers what’s wrong and orders any new part it needs.

I am literally beside myself with joy at the vision of thousands of housecleaners holding a phone up to their vacuum so it can transmit some mysterious parrot-modem-sqwauk-language to the mother ship. But quite apart from the silliness of it all, it’s a usefully concrete, physical metaphor for what much of our software already does.

Ever read the fine print on any of your software? Neither do I, mostly. But when I have, I’ve usually discovered that the company — Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc. — has reserved the right, at whatever point in the future they choose, to have the software communicate information back to them about what sort of machine I own, what other software I run, and precisely what I’ve been doing with their software. Since this is invisible — since we don’t have to actually hold the phone up so our software can speak — we mostly ignore these intrusions. (Unless, as I do, you use a firewall like Zone Alarm that reports any attempt by a piece of software to access the Internet.)

But the time will come, and come quickly, when an increasingly large number of household products — fridges, stoves, microwaves, phones, vacuums, hot-water systems — will be networked. They’ll be able to skip the hold-the-phone-for-me step, and simply tell their manufacturers what we’ve been doing with them. And you probably won’t be able to buy a household tool that doesn’t do that.

I’m not a hard-core privacy nut, but that prospect freaks me out a bit.

(Thanks to Engadget for this one!)