Your cleaner may be recording you: Bengaluru startup’s head-mounted cameras trigger AI privacy storm

BENGALURU: A customer books a cleaner through an app. A worker arrives. But this time, there is a camera strapped to the worker's head.

The image has sparked widespread unease online after on-demand home services startup Pronto confirmed to TOI that a small subset of customers can opt into a programme where household jobs are recorded using visible, head-mounted cameras worn by workers.

The issue gained attention after online portal Entrackr reported that an investor memo linked Pronto's workflows to "physical AI" and robotics training data.

Pronto cofounder and CEO Anjali Sardana said the pilot covers 0.1% of users and is meant for customers who feel uneasy about allowing unfamiliar workers into their homes while away. "They worry about what's happening in their home during their booking. Something may be stolen or broken, or work may not be done properly."

A new investor at Pronto, Lachy Groom, is also a co-founder of Physical Intelligence, a US startup building foundation models for robotics. Pronto recently raised fresh capital from him and others, doubling to a valuation of $200 million in just a few months.

She said videos are anonymised, no audio is recorded, and footage is deleted within 48 hours. But the company confirmed that "derived datasets" from those recordings are retained, including "key point mapping" data tracking body joints and hand movements. When asked whether those datasets could eventually be monetised or shared with third-party AI or robotics firms, Pronto declined to comment.

Customers who opt for it pay an extra Rs 29 per booking; workers are paid extra as well.

Pronto's clarifications have done little to calm the backlash. On X, a post declaring "recording inside your house to train AI! This is scary" drew thousands of views and interactions. "Trust is the cornerstone of any consumer/service business and Pronto just lost it," wrote another user. Others raised a more practical concern, that homes are nearly impossible to truly anonymise. "Think name plates, ID cards, credit cards, bills," one frequent home-services app user told TOI.

Rival platforms moved quickly to distance themselves. "We are in the business of trust, and we take customer privacy extremely seriously. We do not engage in any such activities, have never done so, and have no plans to do so," Urban Company cofounder Abhiraj Bhal told TOI. Snabbit founder Ayush Agarwal said his company is not undertaking any such activity either.

Behind the debate is a rapidly emerging market for "egocentric," or first-person, data used to train physical AI systems. Unlike chatbots trained on text, physical AI needs exposure to real-world environments such as kitchens, utensils, shelves, clutter and repetitive human movement. Some AI labs globally pay between $4 and $10 an hour for such data, according to one founder building in the space.

The legal picture remains murky. Nikhil Narendra, a partner at law firm Trilegal noted that anonymised household data could potentially fall outside India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, while cautioning that India still lacks a governance framework for non-personal data.

For now, the front door remains the last line of privacy. The debate is about how long that holds.