Company's offer to clean your apartment for free met with major skepticism

Free apartment cleaning may sound like a dream in a city where housing costs already strain budgets.

But a new offer in New York City is drawing scrutiny because the people doing the cleaning would also be filming inside residents' homes to help train AI-powered robots.

Ars Technica reported that German startup MicroAGI began promoting the offer on May 28 through its Shift app, advertising "free, trusted professional house cleaners" in exchange for "first-person cleaning footage" to train future household robots.

The company promoted the campaign on social media with a polished video and an upbeat message.

To book an appointment, users are asked for contact details, a home address, and access instructions. The visit is expected to last about two hours.

Shift says the cleaners are professionals, but they would also be wearing cameras as they work.

According to the company, privacy protections are built in. Its FAQ says that "names, faces, or other personal information is automatically anonymized," while its privacy policy says smart glasses or similar devices use machine learning to blur faces and obscure identifiers before footage is uploaded.

Even so, the launch has been met with skepticism. The company does not appear to state whether residents can later request that footage from their homes be removed from robot-training datasets.

Its terms state that users may need to provide payment information, may face fees for late cancellations or no-shows, and that the platform disclaims responsibility for issues such as property damage, theft, or personal injury linked to appointments.

Even if faces and screens are blurred, footage from inside an apartment can still reveal routines, room layouts, possessions, and other highly personal details.

The broader concern is that the cleaning promotion appears to be part of a much larger push to collect training data for robots. The Shift app's privacy policy says that "the collection of data for robotics training" is "the core of microagi's business."

The same platform also recruits people to wear recording gear and capture everyday chores and job tasks for pay.

Ars Technica reported that U.S. General Manager Harry Kilberg said the platform is already paying "tens of thousands of people" in 15 countries to record routine tasks.

At the same time, Shift tells customers, "There is no catch."

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