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A growing number of Pleasanton residents are calling for the city to implement stronger data privacy guardrails for the fleet of robots that are currently assessing hundreds of streets and roads — after one resident found there were basically none at all.
The Daxbots were introduced last month to collect information about sidewalk accessibility and conditions as part of the city’s “Public Right-of-Way Survey” for its ADA Transition Plan.
That prompted lifelong Pleasantonian Brent Werder, a mechanical-design engineer who works in automation and control of robots, to wonder whether the Daxbots are only tracking data on the roads and streets or if they are also retaining other public data, including information on residents. His concerns led him to launch a Change.org petition that had collected 83 signatures as of Wednesday, just four days after it launched.
“There’s no guardrail to keep someone, a bad actor, from accessing that data,” Werder said.
Miriam Sullivan, communications director for Daxbot, said the company is “privacy first” and is “actively working to set a ‘good robots’ standard for how robots interact in public spaces,” according to a statement provided by the city of Pleasanton. “In keeping with this, we do not collect any data in public spaces except what is needed to support specific tasks, such as slopes, uplifts and path widths, and even this is not publicly shared.”
Werder said he first began looking into the robots after noticing one remained parked in front of his house for roughly seven hours. Concerned by recent controversies around public surveillance technology like automated license-plate readers, he was wary of the robots.
“I saw two of these robots, personally, sitting on a street corner for over seven hours … turning their heads to look at passersby and cars, people’s children, kind of looking into people’s windows,” Werder said. “None of that to me seemed like something that’s necessary for ADA sidewalk compliance.”
He reached out to neighbors and looked into the contract the city approved for the robots. Most residents he spoke with were uncomfortable with the program, he said. He said he was also surprised by what he considers a lack of data privacy guardrails in the city’s agreement.
Werder said the city’s contract with Bureau Veritas Technical Assessments contains no explicit restrictions preventing the company from using or retaining data collected by the Daxbots.
Werder said he was also upset at the lack of public outreach from the city before it approved the program. According to the March 17 City Council agenda report, the council approved the roughly $435,000 contract with Bureau Veritas as part of its consent calendar, typically reserved for items considered routine in nature that are approved by a single motion with little to no discussion.
He emphasized that data is extremely valuable to artificial intelligence companies for model training, making it essential for the city to prevent robots from retaining private information unrelated to road infrastructure.
“I definitely understand that there are huge productivity gains and cost production that can be gotten from these kinds of robotic ventures,” Werder said. “But when you see a contract like that, with this kind of foreign company … it doesn’t actually name the Dax robot as being the primary data acquisition tool. And even if it did, it doesn’t limit the scope of what data this robot is able to take.”
However, Sullivan refuted the idea that Daxbot is up to anything nefarious.
“We do not identify or track individuals or sell or distribute imagery of identifiable people, and our assessment robots don’t record or store video except in the rare case of safety incidents,” Sullivan said. “We put QR codes on the front of every robot explaining what that robot is doing and what tooling it is equipped with and will continue to pursue policies that support public trust and a future that includes good robots.”
She highlighted the company’s Good Robots policy work, which lists several principals the company tries to uphold, including safety and privacy.
Still, Werder pointed out the Daxbots that have been assessing the city’s roads and streets are similar to those being sold in the private sector as security and surveillance robots. He said that there’s nothing in the city’s contract with Bureau Veritas that explicitly limits the company from turning on that surveillance functionality.
If the city does not remove the Daxbots, Werder proposes three guardrails: Clear data-handling restrictions; third-party deletion of unnecessary raw sensor data; and a public report detailing what data is collected, where and how long it is stored and who can access it.
They are harmless.
They should be used to write citations