Bengaluru:Home services startup Pronto is offering select househelp professionals nearly double their regular monthly earnings to wear forehead-mounted cameras while working inside customers’ homes.The workers are part of Pronto Verified, a paid service that allows customers to have cleaning jobs recorded through a visible head-mounted camera. The footage is also used to generate data for training artificial intelligence models.Regular Pronto professionals earn about Rs 18,000-26,000 a month. Workers enrolled in the Verified programme currently earn around twice that amount, a company spokesperson told TOI. Their earnings could rise to nearly three times current levels in the coming months as the service scales, the spokesperson said.For now, the programme remains limited. Verified accounts for only a few hundred bookings and employs a low triple-digit number of workers. Pronto expects to expand the pool to around 2,000 professionals over the next 15 days, although it said it does not plan a rapid rollout beyond that.Customers pay an additional fee for the service, ranging from Rs 25 for a 30-minute booking to Rs 119 for a 90-minute session. Consent is obtained both at the time of booking and again when the professional arrives at the customer’s home.Pronto cofounder and CEO Anjali Sardana said the service was created to address customer concerns about allowing unfamiliar workers into their homes, particularly when they are away.“A lot of customers have anxiety about what’s happening in their home during their booking,” Sardana said on LinkedIn. “Maybe something will get stolen or broken, or something will be done poorly. To get rid of this anxiety, they want the booking to be recorded.”According to the company, the forehead-mounted camera is angled toward the worker’s hands, forearms and immediate work area, and does not record audio. Customers can access an anonymised, encrypted recording for up to 48 hours.Pronto said the original video is deleted after processing, but derived datasets are retained for AI training. These include “key point mapping,” which captures the movement of hands, arms and joints while carrying out tasks such as cleaning or organising objects.The startup declined to identify the AI and robotics companies it is working with and did not rule out commercialising the derived datasets in the future.When the programme first surfaced in May, it drew criticism over the privacy implications of recording inside customers’ homes. “Think name plates, ID cards, credit cards and bills,” one user had told TOI. Rivals including Urban Company and Snabbit subsequently distanced themselves from the practice, with Urban Company saying it neither records inside customers’ homes nor plans to do so.
