In April, a video of Indian textile workers wearing head-mounted cameras went viral. Scroll identified them as workers employed at the Gurugram factory of Pearl Global Industries.

They were asked to wear the devices during their shifts and told that the cameras would capture their activities at work. Their consent was not sought for the exercise, they said..

Scroll found that cameras of this sort are offered by a startup founded by two teenagers in Maharashtra that is collecting first-person footage of factory workers to sell to global tech firms, which can then use it to train robots.

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How do these videos help build robots? And how does such data collection align with India’s data protection law?

Producer: Raghav Kakkar
Camera: Priyali Dhingra, Raghav Kakkar
Editor: Hyder Habib