Overview
- The controversy began after a journalist shared an investor memo alleging Pronto was collecting first‑person household footage to train robotics, a claim that went viral and drew widespread attention on May 24.
- Pronto has acknowledged a limited pilot covering about 0.1% of bookings in which workers wear visible outward‑facing cameras only when customers opt in and pay extra, and the company says faces are blurred and footage is deleted within 48 hours.
- Rival platforms Urban Company and Snabbit have publicly denied recording customers’ homes for AI training and said they have no plans to deploy such recording workflows.
- Legal experts and privacy advocates question whether per‑booking consent and anonymisation meet the Digital Personal Data Protection Act’s purpose‑limitation rules, and the Ministry of Electronics and IT has reportedly taken cognisance of the case.
- Reporting links Pronto’s pilot to recent investor ties and funding from backers connected to robotics labs, which raises the prospect that derived datasets such as motion‑mapping could be commercialised and that the practice may reshape how physical AI training data is sourced.