Gig Workers Strap iPhones to Their Foreheads to Train Humanoid Robots, Raising Privacy Alarms

Thousands of gig workers in Nigeria, India, and Argentina are strapping iPhones to their foreheads to record household chores, feeding a booming data industry that trains humanoid robots for companies like Tesla — but experts and privacy advocates are sounding alarms over how this intimate footage is stored, shared, and used.

• Thousands of gig workers across Nigeria, India, and Argentina are strapping iPhones to their foreheads and recording themselves doing household chores for Micro1, a Palo Alto-based company that sells real-world movement data to humanoid robotics companies like Tesla and Figure AI.
• The booming data collection industry, fueled by over $6 billion in humanoid robot investment in 2025, raises serious privacy and informed consent concerns, as workers capture intimate footage of their homes without knowing exactly how their data is stored, shared, or used by third parties.
• Experts warn that collecting sufficient quality data remains a massive challenge, with roboticists noting that humanoid robots may require even more training data than large language models, which were trained on text equivalent to 100,000 years of human reading.