A startup says it will clean New Yorkers' homes for free. The catch? You have to be okay with cleaners wearing cameras to train AI-powered robots

“Here’s how it works,” the company writes. “Book a shift cleaning. A vetted shift operator comes to your home wearing one of our devices. They clean. They leave. You pay nothing. In exchange, we record the cleaning. Robotics is being built on data about how people do daily tasks, and the value of that recording is what funds the service. Anything personal in it is anonymized before the recording is processed.”

Privacy concerns

While there’s certainly a strong appeal in something for nothing, especially a service like housekeeping, which can cost $300 or more in NYC, there are a few things to consider before jumping into this. First, there’s the matter of letting a stranger into your home and giving them full access. Shift doesn’t go into detail about how it vets the people it sends out to clean.

Also, that “anonymized before processing” line is doing a lot of heavy lifting. While the startup says it will blur out names, faces and personal information its cameras capture before it uploads the footage to its cloud servers, mistakes happen and technology isn’t infallible. And, of course, should the company go out of business, the data could be sold to someone else.

It’s also unclear if people can request that videos of their home be removed from the training programs.

The app’s privacy policy says the core business of MicroAFI is “the collection of data for robotics training.” People who are uncomfortable letting strangers into their homes in NYC or who prefer their own level of neat can alternatively wear a camera and record themselves doing daily activities, from cooking and cleaning to repairs or your daily work tasks. Doing so, they can earn $20 per hour plus bonuses.

Training the robots

Of course, in accepting the free cleaning or filming yourself vacuuming, you’re helping to train AI to do the chore in the future. That might be a convenience for some people, but it puts others at risk of not being able to find work down the road.

It’s not just housecleaning either. Shift says other chores will be offered as well in the future.

“Today, cleaning in New York. Soon, handymen, repairs, and errands across the globe,” it wrote. “And this is just one side of Shift, with more on the way.”

It’s not unlike the announcement from Meta last month that employee mouse movements and keystrokes would be used for AI training data. Experts worry that this sort of employee surveillance could raise substantial privacy concerns and put jobs at risk in the future.