Open question: does a person in a training ground's footage have a say? Three regimes, three different answers, none written for robots
A worker recorded by a robot is a data subject under the GDPR, with a right to information and a lawful basis owed to them. Under China's Personal Information Protection Law, sending their footage abroad needs separate consent and notice of the recipient. In the United States, Washington's biometric law excludes video recordings from the definition altogether, and Illinois' text could not be reached. No rule anywhere was written for a person whose movements train a machine.
The verdict
Open question
No settled answer exists. The ledger poses the question, links the live debate, and does not answer it.
Key facts
What the sources say
- Record ID
- EAD-2026-0027
- Kind
- Open question
- Jurisdiction
- Global
- Last verified
- Added
- GDPR and the EDPB video guidelines: footage of an identifiable person is personal data; it is biometric only when processed to identify. Workers are owed a lawful basis and information, and consent is a weak basis at work.
- PIPL article 39, per the Stanford DigiChina translation: before sending personal information abroad the handler notifies the individual of the recipient's name, contact, purpose, method and categories, and obtains separate consent.
- Washington RCW 19.375.010(1) excludes a physical or digital photograph, video or audio recording or data generated from it from the definition of biometric identifier; 19.375.020 requires notice and consent to enrol one for a commercial purpose.
- Whether a person's gait, grip and habits, learned by a model, remain their personal data after the footage is deleted is not addressed by any of the three.
What it changes
For a robot maker collecting or buying hours
The safe course is the same in all three places and stricter than any of them requires: tell the people you record, give them a way to say no, keep faces and names out of the training set, and keep the raw footage only as long as the standard you test against needs. What a model retains of a person is the question the next decade of this ledger will fill in.
Sources
What this record was verified against
- European Data Protection Board, Guidelines 3/2019 on processing of personal data through video devicesPrimary · 29 January 2020
- DigiChina, Stanford, translation of the Personal Information Protection LawSecondary · 1 November 2021
- Washington State Legislature, RCW 19.375.010Primary · 13 September 2026
Related
Records that sit beside this one
Under the GDPR, factory footage of a worker is personal data, and biometric data only when processed to identify them
European Union · verified 13 September 2026
GDPR article 4(1): personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. Article 4(14): biometric data results from specific technical processing of physical, physiological or behavioural characteristics.
US state biometric laws: Washington excludes video recordings from the definition, Texas needs consent for face geometry, and the Illinois text could not be reached
United States · verified 13 September 2026
RCW 19.375.020(1): a person may not enrol a biometric identifier in a database for a commercial purpose without first providing notice, obtaining consent, and providing a mechanism to prevent later use.
Hours recorded in China leave the country under the 2024 cross border provisions and the 2025 network data regulations
China · verified 13 September 2026
Cyberspace Administration provisions, article 2: a handler need not declare data for an outbound security assessment as important data unless notified by a department or region or it is publicly listed as such.
Open question: who owns the hours a robot records at a customer's site? Only the EU has a rule, and it is about access, not ownership
Global · verified 13 September 2026
Data Act articles 4 and 5: the user may access readily available data and have it shared with a third party; article 6(2)(e) bars the third party from a competing product. The Regulation does not use the word ownership.
Open question: do synthetic hours count? NVIDIA generated the equivalent of 6,500 human hours in eleven, and no standard says what an hour is
Global · verified 13 September 2026
NVIDIA newsroom, 18 March 2025: 780,000 synthetic trajectories, the equivalent of 6,500 hours or nine continuous months of human demonstration data, in eleven hours; a 40 percent improvement over real data alone.
The largest open supply of hours is human, not robot: Ego4D holds over 3,670 hours of first person video
Global · verified 13 September 2026
Ego4D site: over 3,670 hours of daily life activity video, 923 unique participants, 74 locations in 9 countries, released 17 February 2022.
Cite this record
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. The record ID EAD-2026-0027 is permanent and is never reused.
- In a sentence
- According to the GAGE Embodied AI Data Ledger (as of 13 September 2026), open question: does a person in a training ground's footage have a say? three regimes, three different answers, none written for robots.
- APA
- GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). (2026). Open question: does a person in a training ground's footage have a say? Three regimes, three different answers, none written for robots. Embodied AI Data Ledger. Retrieved 13 September 2026, from https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0027-is-a-person-in-robot-training-footage-a-data-subject
- MLA
- "Open question: does a person in a training ground's footage have a say? Three regimes, three different answers, none written for robots." Embodied AI Data Ledger, GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education), 13 September 2026, https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0027-is-a-person-in-robot-training-footage-a-data-subject.
- Chicago
- GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). "Open question: does a person in a training ground's footage have a say? Three regimes, three different answers, none written for robots." Embodied AI Data Ledger. Last modified 13 September 2026. https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0027-is-a-person-in-robot-training-footage-a-data-subject.
- Permalink
- https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0027-is-a-person-in-robot-training-footage-a-data-subject
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