Are you okay with your neighborhood being recorded by a private company?

In Pleasanton, California, we are witnessing an unsettling intrusion into our daily lives: robots patrolling our public areas. They are equipped with HD cameras and have the potential to retain video footage of you without your consent. Did you vote for this? According to the City's own staff report, no public outreach was conducted for this contract award.

The City of Pleasanton says these robots are being used for ADA compliance surveys of the sidewalks across the city. What about these robots is purpose-built for infrastructure surveys? Daxbot also sells an autonomous security guard robot. Can the City confirm the survey units can't be used that way?

The City's agreement with Bureau Veritas Technical Assessments, LLC, under which Daxbot's robots operate, includes no provision for deleting the data they gather. Your car, your face, even the way you walk could be captured and, as far as the contract says, kept indefinitely by a private company. The only retention term requires the contractor to keep project records for three years. As it stands, there is no comprehensive federal privacy law, and the contract doesn't fill the gap.

Bureau Veritas is headquartered overseas, which raises questions about data security and privacy. The contract provides no assurances or mechanisms to protect our sensitive data or ensure it is ethically managed. CIP-16437 makes no mention of data deletion from the robots' sensor arrays. It also doesn't say where data is stored, who can access it, or whether Daxbot, which the contract never names, is bound by its confidentiality terms. In short, the company is not contractually required to delete any data.

These concerns don't make us complete Luddites; there are real projects that can benefit greatly from the automation and subsequent cost reduction of public works. However, when such a project does not adequately address the real risks associated with large-scale data collection by a private company, the potential for abuse deserves scrutiny.

By signing this petition, we hope to raise awareness of the issue and demand that the City of Pleasanton address the major data privacy concerns these robots present. The changes we request are as follows:

1. Explicit data handling restrictions, including no reselling of data or other secondary use (e.g. AI training), no audio capture or biometric analysis, redaction of faces and plates
2. Third-party auditable deletion of all raw sensor data not needed for final deliverables
3. A public report on what data was collected, where it is stored, for how long, and who can access it