Some Pleasanton residents want the city to put written limits on what data can be collected by the small robots now rolling through neighborhoods to survey sidewalks, the Pleasanton Weekly reported Wednesday.
The Daxbots began work last month on the city's Public Right-of-Way Survey, which gathers information on sidewalk accessibility and condition for Pleasanton's ADA Transition Plan. The City Council approved the roughly $435,000 contract with Bureau Veritas Technical Assessments on March 17 as part of its consent calendar, according to the council agenda report cited by the paper.
The petition
Brent Werder, a lifelong resident and mechanical-design engineer who works in robot automation, started a Change.org petition after he said a robot sat in front of his house for about seven hours. The petition had 83 signatures as of Wednesday, four days after it launched, the Weekly reported.
Werder told the paper he saw robots on a street corner "turning their heads to look at passersby and cars" and said that did not seem necessary for a sidewalk survey.
He said the city's contract with Bureau Veritas has no explicit restrictions on using or keeping data the robots collect, does not name the Daxbot as the main data tool and does not limit what the machines can record. He also faulted the city for not doing public outreach before approving the program.
He has proposed three guardrails if the robots stay: clear rules on data handling, deletion of unneeded raw sensor data by a third party, and a public report on what is collected, where it is stored, for how long and who can see it.
