The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is reviewing the consent and data collection practices of a startup that records domestic service workers and sells the videos to robotics labs. This investigation was launched weeks after Human Archive announced it had secured $8.2 million in seed funding to expand its operations in India.
The funding round's main investors include Wing Venture Capital and NVP Capital, along with angel investors from Y Combinator and companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, and Meta.
The funds will be used to equip gig workers in cleaning homes, cooking in cloud kitchens, and providing hotel services with camera headsets and custom sensor hardware. Robotics labs will purchase recorded videos of these workers' tasks to train machines to perform physical tasks.
According to CEO Raj Patel, the company is operating over a thousand headsets in various regions of India and is developing gloves, motion capture suits, and wrist cameras to supplement video data.
However, workers interviewed by MIT Technology Review expressed uncertainty about how the recorded videos would be stored, shared, or used by the robotics companies purchasing them. “If workers are involved in such activities, it is important for the company to inform them of the purpose and the potential long-term impacts of this technology,” said Yasmine Kotturi, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Human Archive stated that its contracts comply with India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act and that it displays privacy notices containing consent details, with all videos anonymized and faces blurred. The DPDP Act is still in its early stages of enforcement, and the government's review may set a precedent for how regulators handle video data collected from workers and their households.
The debate prompting the Indian IT Ministry's attention
Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal posted on X platform that his company would not participate in data collection from workers. Patel responded by stating that Urban Company “will soon be forced to reconsider, or risk becoming irrelevant.”
Co-founder Rushil Agarwal posted that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana “laughed at him and called him stupid” when he raised the idea. Pronto confirmed that it had early discussions but ultimately chose to back out.
Reports indicate that Pronto conducted separate selective recording tests while performing household chores. The IT Ministry evaluated this project following media reports about the pilot program and ongoing debates regarding which companies should be allowed to conduct recordings in Indian households.
The government's investigation into a Y Combinator-backed startup's willingness to collect data from Indian workers within weeks of the seed funding announcement indicates that regulatory scrutiny extends to how foreign companies collect data on Indian workers.