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A tech startup is offering New York City residents free home cleaning with a twist—it will send “professional cleaners” wearing cameras to record everything they do. All that data will supposedly be used to train AI-driven robots.
The unusual pitch comes from the German startup MicroAGI, whose website describes the company as a “team of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to accelerate embodied AI.” It began publicizing the free home-cleaning service run through its newly launched Shift app on May 28, with posts on social media sites such as X and LinkedIn featuring a video set to the upbeat piano notes of the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song “Empire State of Mind.”
The Shift app website claims it “connects New Yorkers with free, trusted professional house cleaners” in exchange for recording “first-person cleaning footage to help train the next generation of household robots.” The “book a free cleaning” link directs clients to enter information such as a phone number, email address, and home address, along with access instructions, before booking an appointment that lasts an estimated two hours.
From a privacy standpoint, the Shift app website’s FAQ states that “names, faces or other personal information is automatically anonymized, with any sensitive details blurred before it’s ever used…. We blur all personally identifiable information from screens and ID cards, to pieces of paper and cell phones to help protect both you and your home.”
The Shift app’s privacy policy says the company uses “advanced machine learning models” running directly on smart glasses or video capture devices to “perform irreversible transformations such as automated face blurring and identifier obfuscation” before any data is uploaded to the company’s cloud servers.
But there is no mention of whether people can ever request that their home cleaning videos be removed from the training datasets for robots. And it’s unclear whether the company’s anonymization techniques are enough to ensure that people’s homes can’t ever be identified when they appear in training datasets.
Although the Shift app website claims “there is no catch” for the free cleaning, the FAQ notes that booking an appointment requires payment information and warns that clients may be charged if they cancel appointments with less than 24 hours’ notice or are not available to let cleaners in at the appointment time. The Shift app terms of service document also seeks to absolve the platform of responsibility for any property damage, theft, or personal injury that may ensue from the cleaning appointments.
The reason behind the promotion
So why would a tech startup offer free cleaning? The first-person cleaning data is supposedly valuable enough for the company to “offer cleaning services free of charge for a limited time” by covering the cost of the professional cleaners, according to the Shift app website. The Shift app’s privacy policy describes the “core of microagi’s business” as “the collection of data for robotics training.”