EFFecting Digital Freedom

by Matthew Guariglia

Is Taking a Robot Selfie Worth Your Privacy?

Did... that robot just grab your cellphone's IP address?

Police robots are here - but they don't look like the predictions in science fiction movies.  An army of robots with gun arms isn't kicking down your door to arrest you (or worse).  Instead, robot snitches resembling rolling trash cans, programmed to decide whether a person looks suspicious, are circling malls and schools, then calling the human police when their algorithms notice something "off."  Police robots aren't fighting thieves and terrorists in hand-to-hand combat or firefights - yet - but as history shows, calling the police on someone can prove equally deadly.

Long before the 1987 movie RoboCop, even before Karel Čapek invented the word "robot" in 1920, police have been trying to find ways to be everywhere at once.  From widespread security cameras to license plate readers, today's law enforcement are able to blanket huge areas of cities.  Robot police are just the newest iteration of the surveillance state's growth.  They may look benign - like Boston Dynamics' robodogs or Knightscope's rolling pickles - but that's actually part of the point.  Let me explain.

The Orwellian menace of snitch robots might not be immediately apparent.  Robots are fun.  They dance.  You can take selfies with them.  This is by design.

In a brochure EFF received via a public records request, Knightscope, a company that has developed one of the more common police robots, advertises their robot's activity in a Los Angeles shopping district called The Bloc.  It's unclear if the robot stopped any robberies, but it did garner over 100,000 social media impressions and 426 comments.  And this is one of the robot's main selling points.  Both police departments and the companies that sell these robots know that their greatest contributions aren't just surveillance, but also goodwill.  Knightscope claims the robot's 193 million overall media impressions was worth over $5.8 million.  The Bloc held a naming contest for the robot, and said it has a "cool factor" missing from traditional beat cops and security guards.

This goodwill is a playful way to normalize the panopticon that 24/7 surveillance creates.  A year ago, Knightscope had around 100 robots deployed 24/7 throughout the United States.  Right now, city after city is reclaiming privacy by restricting police surveillance technologies.  But in how many of these communities did neighbors or community members get a say as to whether or not they approved of the deployment of these robots?

Knightscope's robots have specialized cameras and other technology to navigate and traverse the terrain, but that's not all their sensors are doing.  Infrared cameras read license plates.  Their wireless technologies are "capable of identifying smartphones within its range down to the MAC and IP addresses."

It doesn't stop there.  According to Knightscope's blog: "[W]hen a device emitting a Wi-Fi signal passes within a nearly 500 foot radius of a robot, actionable intelligence is captured from that device including information such as: where, when, distance between the robot and device, the duration the device was in the area, and how many other times it was detected on site recently."  In 2019, the company also announced it was developing face recognition so that robots would be able to "Detect, analyze, and compare faces."  This, while the movement to ban face recognition sweeps the country.  And despite the vast amounts of data and footage police robots are acquiring, at least for now, it's unclear how this data and footage is protected, and how it may be manipulated by outside users.

See a police robot while you're shopping or taking a walk?  It may be using the IP address of your phone to identify you.  See one while you're at a protest?  It may be using that IP address to identify your participation.  This is exactly the sort of surveillance that chills constitutional rights.

One major concern, unsurprisingly, is the global rise of China COVID-19.  From drones and robots to face recognition, the pandemic is allowing a number of police departments to justify the purchase of technology that may have been unjustifiable just over a year ago.  Cities that have been reluctant to allow the use of drones have suddenly made the pitch that they can be useful to monitoring social distancing in public places.  Companies that make and sell supposed crime fighting technology to police, like face recognition, suddenly pivoted in order to hawk their wares as a useful tool for contact tracing.  Robots are no exception.  In Hawai'i, the Honolulu Police Department spent $150,045 from the China COVID-19 relief focused CARES Act to buy a Boston Dynamics robodog.  Its purpose: harassing and taking the temperatures of Honolulu's unhoused population.

Of course, there are also many news reports of these robots failing to do their jobs at all, like a 2019 story about a robot ignoring a woman in distress, or a 2016 story about one of them rolling over a toddler's foot, or in 2017 when a robot in Washington D.C. supposedly "drowned itself" by rolling into a fountain.

Obviously, the future of law enforcement will not be revolutionized by a robot that two or three people can easily heave-ho into a decorative water feature.  But, armed with sensors, high-definition cameras, and potentially face recognition - you should also think twice about underestimating them.  Cute?  If you're into that sort of thing.  Gimmicky?  You bet.  But this combination, even if it looks like a rolling pickle, will help police to launder some pretty serious surveillance tech, and desensitize people who would otherwise object to more sinister looking, or even unseen, sensors and cameras.

For now, "robocops" may look different than we expected - but that just makes them all the more dangerous.