Robotic Security Guards

The New York Times reports about the company, Knightscope, and its product, the K5 Autonomous Data Machine.  The robot is designed to perform the role of a security guard or night watchman.  The Times reports:

The robot, which can be seen in a promotional video, is still very much a work in progress. The system will have a video camera, thermal imaging sensors, a laser range finder, radar, air quality sensors and a microphone. It will also have a limited amount of autonomy, such as the ability to follow a preplanned route. It will not, at least for now, include advanced features like facial recognition, which is still being perfected.

 The Times points out that some people are arguing that the robot will take jobs away from low-paid workers.  Critics worry that this robot will take the job of security guards and night watchmen due to its lower cost (projected to run at $6.25 per hour).

The Times also notes that the robot, or at least the company's vision of the robot, is drawing the ire of privacy advocates.  Quoting Knightscope co-founder, William Santana Li, the Times reports:

“We don’t want to think about ‘RoboCop’ or ‘Terminator,’ we prefer to think of a mash up ‘Batman,’ ‘Minority Report’ and R2-D2.”  

Mr. Li envisions a world of K5 security bots patrolling schools and communities, in what would amount to a 21st-century version of a neighborhood watch. The all-seeing mobile robots will eventually be wirelessly connected to a centralized data server, where they will have access to “big data,” making it possible to recognize faces, license plates and other suspicious anomalies.

Li believes that privacy concerns can be addressed by making the data collected by these robots available to the public at large.  

I think that making the information publicly available would not fix the privacy concerns that Li's vision raises.  One worry about increased surveillance is that the data collected will be used for voyeuristic purposes, and making information publicly available will remove safeguards against this that police department policies may put in place.  

More importantly, even if the information is available to the public at large, the areas that these robots would patrol and the information they collect would be a function of somebody's discretion -- and people living in high crime neighborhoods would find themselves not only disproportionately surveilled by the police, but by the public at large.