Your floor like the jets of gold down your face. In principle, this is how good the proposal sounds. shifta service launched in New York that offers comprehensive home cleaning services. Is it perhaps an NGO? Well no, the company does not charge in currency: an operator enters your house to the kitchen (literally) wearing a recording device that allows him to record his movements on video during the entire cleaning session.
That video is then converted into training data for robotics and AI. In other words, the user does not pay with money, they pay with data. This exchange is not new by any means, but the saying “if something is free it is because the product is you” has gone from the screens to the most intimate part: your home.
Clean your house and pay with your privacy. The mechanism is direct: a service in exchange for data. According to says Harry KilbergShift’s US CEO on his X/Twitter profile, upon your request, the company sends a “verified” operator to clean up and leave. In exchange, it records the cleaning so that robotics companies have access to those movements and, through training, their units can replicate it.
In other words, there is a camera monitoring the movements of the operator and in the background, your dirt, the rooms of your house and each and every one of your things that are visible and can be cleaned. The Service FAQ They detail that the recordings are anonymized before being processed and that they blur any information that could identify you. But of course, “anonymized” is not the same as private: There is research that shows that anonymized data is not so anonymized: it can be re-identified quite often when crossed with other sources. And in a house it is even easier: the distribution of space, objects and your routines They make up a unique image of you, your tastes and your habits.. Anonymizing the video does not eliminate that trace, it only hides it in plain sight.
How does it work? shift
Why is it important. Because the home has historically been the last stronghold of privacy. You may post photos of yourself having brunch on a terrace in Malasaña, but you might think twice before sharing your breakfast muffin in a cup of Mr. Wonderful with a cosque while wearing a threadbare robe with cheese stains from last night’s pizza. It is true that the fever of connected devices and wearables had reduced that redoubt, but Shift goes one step further: it is an active recording of the interior of private homes made by an outsider and that is expressly dedicated to a market.
The company accumulates a huge amount of information about you: how you live, what you have, how you behave in private. In return, you have a vague idea of what he does with your data and you don’t know who he sells it to or how he uses it. It is, in short, an imbalance of information from which there is no turning back. On the other hand and as Shift explains, home cleaning and its automation towards an eventual service carried out by robots is just the beginning: there will be an expansion towards home maintenance, repairs and errands. If the model scales, the volume of private indoor data that would be generated would be enormous, an asset as valuable as it is sensitive.
Context. The closest examples of the digital attention economy are well known: Google and Facebook have built their respective empires by offering free services in exchange for behavioral data, only Shift takes it to the physical world, one step further, more intimate and more complex to revoke.
Its business model is part of the trend of training robots by knowing how humans move and how we perform in real spaces, something that companies such as Figure AI either Physical Intelligence (Pi) because in reality, we are living in a race to obtain this information.
How they do it. Its operation consists of three steps: verifying the operators, recording during service and anonymization before processing. The Shift project begins in New York and on its website it announces its presence in 15 countries (although it seems that it is more of a promise of deployment than a reality). Its beginnings are common in these times of social networks and virality: respond to the publication with “Shift” to receive early access and gain visibility.
Of course, what is not publicly explained is the technical architecture behind data anonymization, which third parties receive the data, the security standards applied to the devices carried by the operators or the audit mechanisms (if they use them).
Yes, but. In fact, as explained it would not meet the standards of the GDPR European (article 5 refers to the fact that any processing of personal data must be transparent, limited and justified). One of Shift’s slogans is: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins.”
One thing must be given to the startup: it is honest from the beginning when it comes to making it clear that the recorded data is going to be commercialized. How many conditions of use of applications that we use daily are less clear when it comes to talking about the destination of the data. Of course, informed consent is weak precisely because of the opaqueness behind it and because of an obvious reality: a recording of your home is not a tweet and the consequences of sharing it are much more serious.
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Cover | shift with Gemini
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