Robots in the Cloud with Privacy: A New Threat to Data Protection?

The focus of this paper is on the class of robots for personal or domestic use, which are connected to a networked repository on the internet that allows such machines to share the information required for object recognition, navigation and task completion in the real world. The aim is to shed light on how these robots will challenge current rules on data protection and privacy. On one hand, a new generation of network-centric applications could in fact collect data incessantly and in ways that are “out of control,” because such machines are increasingly “autonomous.” On the other hand, it is likely that individual interaction with personal machines, domestic robots, and so forth, will also affect what U.S. common lawyers sum up with the Katz’s test as a reasonable “expectation of privacy.” Whilst lawyers continue to liken people’s responsibility for the behaviour of robots to the traditional liability for harm provoked by animals, children, or employees, attention should be drawn to the different ways in which humans will treat, train, or manage their robots-in-the-cloud, and how the human-robot interaction may affect the multiple types of information that are appropriate to reveal, share, or transfer, in a given context.