Elderly care robots: Imagine, your elderly mother who is 80 years old and has never had a companion since being left home alone can now at least have a friendly robot taking the medicines, playing her favorite pieces and even talking about the weather. It is a relief at first but then you realize that it is taping her every single word.
This is not a sci-fi paranoia. Forbes Tech eventually exposed how many of the most popular elder care bots (EllieQ, Care-O-bot, etc.) record voice logs, health metrics and sometimes even floor plans, with little or no particular permission. When such machines turn into life saviors of lonely old people then it creates a worrying question, are we selling privacy in exchange of comfort?
How Much Data Do These Robots Really Collect?
A majority of companion bots present themselves as benevolent assistants, though behind their colorful windows, they were high-end harvesting machines. Consider the example of a popular care robot Temi. It has voice recognition so that it invites you to stay as you talk to your companion, yet its terms of service indicate that it saves conversations to improve the services it offers, which is very broadly defined and may include training AI or selling them to third parties.
- In a survey done by AARP in 2024, 68 percent of the older adults found that they were unaware that their conversations were recorded.
- During a Wired investigational report, Paro, a therapeutic seal bot, was found passing on the information on emotional responses to cloud data centers in Japan.
The best part is? As opposed to medical devices, these bots usually happen to lie in unregulated consumer tech spheres, so HIPAA safeguards do not apply. That sleep pattern which your mum follows? It might fall in the hands of an insurance company.
The Legal Black Hole: Why No One’s Stopping This
This is where it all gets grey. The U.S does not have legislation about emotional AI privacy, and the European GDPR merely addresses it. The AI morals expert and researcher Dr. Kate Crawford, in a comment to MIT Tech Review described the reality as follows: “We are letting corporations weaponize AI and test it on vulnerable citizens with no accountability at all.”
An example of this is that in 2023, a Florida family filed suit against Intuition Robotics after the bot sent to their father (EllieQ) was hacked and the scammer had his confession regarding his depression exposed. The stockbird company submitted–but the precedent had been once established.
Real-World Fallout: When Bots Break Trust
I want to speak about Joy for All, the pet cat which is produced as a companion to dementia patients. Cute, right? Until recently when it was reported by Krebs on Security via its application had poor encryption that enables hackers to eavesdrop on voice commands. The bot of one victim was tricked into requesting her credit card information- in a cheery voice that robot normally uses.
It is not only a matter of data leaking. The research at Stanford in 2023 showed that elderly people tend to open up to robots rather than human beings due to sharing regrets, fears, and even financial concerns. Once the threat of monetizing an intimate relationship or weaponizing it becomes the threat, the damage to the mental faculties may not be repairable.
Fighting Back: Can We Have Both Care and Privacy?
The answer is not to quit the tech, the answer is to insist on ethical design. There are some startups on the forefront:
- Dublin Robotics Lab came up with an open-source robot that completes all processing of data locally without sending that data to the cloud.
- Japan RIKEN Institute is also moving towards a forgetting AI that destroys conversations 24 hours later.
Until legislations do, however, there is something a family can do:
See what privacy settings the bots use (most bots are set to share everything).
Block suspect traffic by using network firewalls.
Lobby laws that treat emotional AI as medical, rather than toy.
Final Sentence: Do You Want A Robot to Know About All the Secrets of Your Grandmother?
Convenience should not become an excuse to convenience ourselves to surveillance. Such bots have the capacity to transform the field of elder care, except that the corporate secrecy has to be banished and transparency has to be insisted on.
The awkward reality is that a human nurse would get canned in the event he/she quietly trafficked in intimate moments at the behest of self-preservation and without the acquiescent approval. Why does a free pass apply to robots?