Pronto faces privacy backlash over AI camera recordings inside customers’ homes – Indian Television Dot Com
Publish Date: 2026-05-25 01:49:00
Source Domain: indiantelevision.com
MUMBAI: Looks like India’s latest AI debate has come home, quite literally. Pronto, the Bengaluru-based startup known for promising household help in under 10 minutes, has landed in the middle of a privacy storm after reports revealed that some service visits involved workers carrying outward-facing cameras inside customers’ homes.
The controversy erupted after journalist Harsh Upadhyay posted on X claiming the company was using “small outward-facing cameras during select opt-in jobs” as part of a broader push linked to physical AI research. The post quickly gained traction, clocking more than two lakh views and triggering a wider conversation around consent, surveillance and the future of AI training.
At the centre of the debate is “physical AI”, a fast-growing field focused on training robots and intelligent systems to perform real-world tasks such as cleaning, cooking and elderly care. For such systems to improve, companies need massive amounts of real-life behavioural data, and that increasingly means collecting information from homes and workplaces.
In response to the backlash, Pronto insisted that recordings are only carried out with explicit customer consent.
In a statement shared on X, Pronto said users must actively opt in before every booking involving cameras. The company added that unless customers agree and pay for the programme separately, no worker arrives with recording equipment.
The startup also clarified that the pilot currently reaches only 0.1 per cent of its customer base. It claimed that faces and identifying details are automatically blurred, no personally identifiable information is uploaded or shared, and footage is deleted within 48 hours.
Still, the clarification has not fully swept away concerns.
Critics and legal observers have pointed to sections of the company’s privacy policy that mention aggregated user data may be retained indefinitely for “research or statistical…
