Better this than the Bot Company, which has been apparently renting out AirBnBs for robot testing and leaving them trashed: https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...
Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
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Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#12”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.
I wonder how long it will be before we see politician/celebrity houses with full 3d walkthroughs made from gaussian splats that source from this kind of "every type of interior in the world" mass data set. I wonder if that will prompt some kind of legislative action against this type of service.
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#13Are these the same people that were renting airbnbs and wrecking them using them to train their robots?
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#14”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.
Exactly and any "future robots" that are actually capable of cleaning your home will be doing the same thing. It'd be streaming 24/7 audio/video/sensor data of everyone and everything in your home back to the company where all of it will be analyzed and used to make assumptions about you and your family which will be sold and resold.
At this point I wouldn't allow an internet connected roomba into my home, I'm sure as hell not going to let a robot maid in.
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#15Better this than the Bot Company, which has been apparently renting out AirBnBs for robot testing and leaving them trashed: https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...
I mean is it? At least the AirBnB owner has some recourse, any attempt to fight exploitation from “free services” goes nowhere
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#16Just a reminder: "Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i...
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#17”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.
... and also share those images with dozens of companies and potentially have those images leak online. Example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/photos-robot-roomba-vacuum...
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#18”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.
The Audacity of these people
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#19Better this than the Bot Company, which has been apparently renting out AirBnBs for robot testing and leaving them trashed: https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...
I mean is it? At least the AirBnB owner has some recourse, any attempt to fight exploitation from “free services” goes nowhere
The article specifically mentions at least one property owner who has been denied any recourse because of the lack of before/after photos (presumably before that specific rental).
Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots
#20”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.
Exactly and any "future robots" that are actually capable of cleaning your home will be doing the same thing. It'd be streaming 24/7 audio/video/sensor data of everyone and everything in your home back to the company where all of it will be analyzed and used to make assumptions about you and your family which will be sold and resold. At this point I wouldn't allow an internet connected roomba into my home, I'm sure a…
I’m a little more hopeful that the future will allow for local (network free) frontier AI technology.
Being that I’m a tech enthusiast and computer science nerd I tend to live less on the bleeding edge of technology because of privacy infringing hardware. Take for example meta glasses. So many people have adopted them because they don’t care about privacy as much as I do. So they get to live with the latest and greatest.
Though, running a local LLM on my laptop (that is state of the art) has made me a little more hopeful that the future is around the corner. Who would have thought that one day we could run advanced AI on a laptop that’s able to do RAG and CAG.