You can get your home professionally cleaned for free in New York City, with a huge caveat.
Dishes piling up? Trash well past the brim of the can? That thin layer of dust on your furniture starting to stratify? Well, if you’re in New York City and open to unusual propositions, there’s a company willing to take care of those and other unresolved house cleaning tasks you might have, all for free. The catch: you let the cleaners record the entire process inside your home from the cameras affixed to their “magic hats” to help train AI. […]
Announced with a recent post on X, Shift’s introductory video attempts to explain how one’s free cleaning service might go down. The video opens with a plucky young lad knocking on an apartment door, ready to deliver some elbow grease. The company’s US GM, Harry Kilberg, then appears to convey Shift’s mad love for the 5 Boroughs by saying “the future has always started in New York. This time, it will start in your apartment.” We then see the famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph while the instrumental track from Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ 2009 “Empire State of Mind” plays in the background. There is no longer any doubt as to whether or not this tech company is tapped in with Real New Yawkers. […]
The company promises all names, faces, and other sensitive data that might be caught on cam are automatically anonymized. They go on to explain that they “blur all personally identifiable information from screens and ID cards, to pieces of paper and cell phones, to help protect both you and your home.” There doesn’t seem to be anything in Shift’s FAQ about how one could later request to have the video from their session removed from the training dataset after it’s recorded and uploaded. […]
…Shift’s terms of service says the company is not responsible for any theft, personal injury, or property damage that might occur during a cleaning, but don’t worry. The “independent cleaning professionals” you’re inviting into your home have been “vetted by [their] partners,” so that should probably allay any remaining concerns.
Shift says the data gleaned by recording all these menial tasks will go on to train “the next generation of household robots.” That future sure sounds nice and like something we will all have access to.
Sounds like a great idea…what can possibly go wrong?