Service Privacy Policy

The short version

A Tau cleaning is performed by a humanoid robot that is operated in real time by a trained human being in another location. That person sees your home through the robot’s cameras while they work.

We record what those cameras see. We use that footage to run the cleaning and to train the AI models that we hope will eventually do the job without a human operator. This is not optional. It is how the service works, and it is why the service is priced the way it is.

The robot’s microphones are disabled. We do not record or listen to audio in your home. Ever. The robot can speak to you through a speaker, but audio only travels one way: your operator can talk, and cannot hear you.

The rest of this page explains exactly what we collect, who sees it, how long we keep it, and what control you have.

1. Who we are

Tau Robotics, Inc. (“Tau,” “we,” “us”) is a Delaware corporation operating a humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco, California.

Contact: bookings@tau-robotics.com

This policy covers our booking platform and cleaning visits performed in your home or office. Our website is governed by a separate privacy policy.

2. What we collect during a cleaning

Video. Continuous video from cameras mounted on the robot’s head and wrists, for the duration of the visit. This is a first-person view of your space, including rooms, surfaces, objects, and any people present.

No audio. The robot’s microphones are disabled. We do not capture, transmit, record, store, or listen to sound in your home, in real time or otherwise. The robot does have a speaker: your operator can speak to you through it. Audio travels one way only. They can talk; they cannot hear you.

Robot telemetry. Joint positions, forces, balance state, battery, and other sensor readings from the robot itself.

Operator commands. The motion inputs our operator sends to the robot, and the timing of those inputs.

Spatial data. Depth and geometry derived from the robot’s cameras, effectively a three-dimensional record of the layout of the rooms it works in, and the position of objects within them.

Service records. What was cleaned, how long it took, what went wrong, and any notes the operator makes.

3. What we collect outside a cleaning

Booking and account information. Name, service address, email, phone, access instructions, scheduling preferences, restricted-area designations. If you share your WiFi network name and password so the robot can connect during visits, we store those too.

Payment information. Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and are handled under their privacy policy. We never see or store your full card number, only the last four digits, card brand, and expiration, which Stripe returns to us for your receipts and billing records.

Booking platform data. We do not use analytics, advertising trackers, or third-party cookies on our booking platform. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, which include IP addresses, as an ordinary part of serving it.

Customer communications. When booking, you choose email or text for arrival updates and access questions. We store that choice. If you choose text, we also collect and store messages, replies, delivery records, and consent records. During a cleaning, an operator may send the booking contact a selected still image from the robot’s camera by text when we need cleaning instructions. Twilio, mobile carriers, and the recipient’s device process those text communications. Once delivered, copies may remain on the recipient’s device and are under the recipient’s control.

Our public website is covered by a separate privacy policy.

4. Who can see inside your home

Your operator. One trained operator controls the robot during your visit and sees the live camera feed for that duration. All operators are W-2 employees. Some are employed directly by Tau, some placed through a staffing agency. We do not use gig workers or independent contractors for this role. Regardless of who issues their paycheck, every operator is background-checked, trained by us, bound by the same confidentiality obligations and access controls, and works on-site from Tau’s own facility in San Francisco, not from home, and not from outside the United States. This describes the person operating the robot in real time; recorded footage is separately handled by the service providers described below.

Supervisors and support staff, where needed to resolve a safety issue, an incident, or a service complaint.

Our engineering team, when reviewing recorded footage for model training, safety review, or quality assurance.

Service providers who help us store and process data, under contract and bound to use it only for us. These fall into the following categories: cloud hosting and storage, payment processing, and data labelling and annotation.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done either in the preceding twelve months.

Mobile information and messaging consent. We do not sell, rent, or share mobile phone numbers, SMS/MMS opt-in data, or messaging consent with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. We disclose this information only to service providers, including Twilio and mobile carriers, as needed to deliver and support the messages you request, and as otherwise required by law.

5. How we use what we collect

To clean your home. The live camera feed is what our operator uses to do the work.

To train our AI models. This is a core purpose, not a side effect. Recorded video, telemetry, and operator commands become training data for the vision-language-action models we are building. Our goal is a robot that performs the cleaning autonomously; the only way we know to get there is to learn from real work in real homes.

To improve safety and quality. Reviewing incidents, near-misses, and failures.

To operate the business. Scheduling, billing, support, and legal compliance.

6. Other people in your home

The person who books the cleaning cannot consent on behalf of everyone else in the household. Please tell anyone who lives with you that a camera-equipped robot with a live remote operator will be in the home, and when. Anyone present can ask the operator to stop at any time, and the operator will end the session.

Bedrooms and bathrooms are not cleaned unless you opt in. They are excluded from a standard cleaning. If you choose to include them at booking, the robot enters those rooms and its cameras record them, and your operator sees them live.

7. Restricted areas and your controls

Before the visit: bedrooms and bathrooms are excluded unless you opt in at booking. You can also mark any other room, area, or object as off-limits. Your operator is given these instructions before the visit and does not take the robot into excluded areas.

During the visit: you or anyone present can ask the operator to stop at any time, for any reason, and the operator will end the session.

After the visit: you can request deletion of footage from that visit. See §9.

8. How long we keep things

Data	Retention
Video from a visit	Indefinitely, or until you request deletion
Robot telemetry and operator command logs	Indefinitely, or until you request deletion
Service records	7 years
Booking and account data	Life of your account, plus 3 years
WiFi details, if you share them	Until you replace them or ask us to delete them

About indefinite retention. We want to be direct about this, because it is the part of our service most likely to matter to you.

The video our robot records is not a byproduct of the cleaning. It is the training data. There is no separate, sanitized copy. The footage from your home, as recorded and including unblurred faces, is what our models learn from.

Training a model is also not a one-time event. Models are retrained, architectures change, and data collected today gets used again years later against methods that do not exist yet. Data that expires is data we cannot learn from twice.

So we keep it. We are not putting an expiry date on it and we are not going to imply one. You can end this at any time by requesting deletion under §9, and we will honor that. Absent a request from you, we retain this footage for as long as we operate.

9. Deleting your data, including an honest limitation

You can ask us to delete data from your visits at any time at bookings@tau-robotics.com. When you do:

• We delete the raw video and telemetry from our systems.
• We remove the data from our training sets, so it will not be used in any future model.

What we cannot do: if footage from your home was already used to train a model, that training has already influenced the model’s parameters. Those parameters are not a database and individual visits cannot be extracted from them or subtracted out. We will not use your data again, but we cannot un-train a model that has already been trained.

10. Sensitive information

California treats some categories as sensitive, and two are relevant here:

Precise geolocation. Your service address is your home address.

Biometric and image data. Our cameras will capture the faces of people in your home. We do not run facial recognition. We do not attempt to identify individuals. We do not build face templates or match faces across visits. Faces are not blurred. Footage enters our training pipeline as recorded, because a robot moving through an occupied home has to perceive where people are and which way they are facing in order to work safely around them. This means images of you and anyone else present are retained as part of our training data, subject to the retention periods in §8 and the deletion rights in §9.

We use sensitive personal information only for the purposes described in §5 and do not use it to infer characteristics about you.

11. Your California privacy rights

If you are a California resident, you have the right to:

• Know what personal information we collect, use, and disclose about you.
• Delete personal information we hold about you, subject to §9 and to legal exceptions.
• Correct inaccurate personal information.
• Limit our use of sensitive personal information.
• Opt out of sale or sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not do either, so there is nothing to opt out of, but the right exists and you may exercise it.
• Not be retaliated against for exercising any of these rights.

To make a request: email bookings@tau-robotics.com. We will verify your identity before acting. You may use an authorized agent.

Important limitation on the deletion right: because recording is how the service works, we cannot provide a cleaning without collecting video. You may delete data after a visit, and you may stop using the service, but we cannot perform a cleaning with the cameras off.

12. Children

Our service is for adults. Children may be present in a home we clean, and our cameras will capture them. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16 for the purpose of selling or sharing it, and we do not sell or share personal information at all.

If children who require supervision will be present, you or another adult you authorize must remain in the home and supervise them for the entire visit. Tau staff, operators, and robots do not supervise children.

13. Security

Video, telemetry, and account data are stored on Google Cloud and are encrypted in transit and at rest.

Access to stored footage is limited to Tau personnel who need it: our engineering team for model training, safety review, and quality assurance, and supervisors and support staff handling a safety issue, an incident, or a service complaint. Once footage is saved to our systems it can be accessed remotely, not only from our facility. Permissions are scoped by role rather than granted to everyone in the organization.

The live camera feed is separate. The continuous feed is streamed only to an operator station inside our facility, for the duration of the visit it belongs to, and is not accessible through the account-based system described above. If the booking contact chose text and consented to SMS/MMS, an operator may deliberately export an individual still frame and send it to that contact, as described in section 3.

Our data labelling vendor views recorded footage in order to annotate it, under contract and bound to use it solely for us. Their access is view-only; they cannot download or export footage.

We are an early-stage company and our security program is developing alongside the service. We will update this section as it does.

We will notify affected individuals and regulators of a breach as required by California law.

14. Changes

We will post changes here and update the date at the top. For material changes to how we use footage from your home, we will notify you by email before the change takes effect.

15. Contact

Tau Robotics, Inc.
San Francisco, California
bookings@tau-robotics.com