The apps were designed for home security. They’re being used to watch and harass domestic workers

One day in April, Anjali, a domestic worker employed at three apartments in a housing complex on the outskirts of Delhi, decided to leave work at noon due to a leg injury. She had just left for home when one of her employers — whose apartment she had skipped due to the injury — called her. Anjali, who requested to be identified by a pseudonym over fears she would lose her job, told Rest of World they screamed at her, accusing her of avoiding work.

The employer had received a notification about Anjali’s exit from the complex on MyGate, a neighborhood management app used in over 25,000 apartment complexes in India, according to its website. The notification had been sent without any context about why Anjali had left early and without offering her an option to explain herself.

Apps like MyGate and its competitors ApnaComplex and NoBrokerHood have gained popularity across urban India in recent years. These apps automate surveillance in housing societies — notifying and seeking permission from residents every time a guest, a delivery person, or a domestic worker enters or leaves the complex. They also facilitate utility payments, communication between residents, and the booking of slots for shared amenities.

But the technology built by these companies is inherently problematic as the apps allow the monitoring of domestic workers, often without their consent or knowledge, lawyers and researchers told Rest of World. The apps further an existing form of discrimination that plays out in urban Indian apartment complexes, according to digital activist and researcher Srinivas Kodali. These “walled gardens have been built by the upper classes to essentially forget how bad the outside world is” and exclude the poor, he told Rest of World. “There was always an amount of surveillance as to who gets to access the space, and now that access is highly monitored, gamified.”

MyGate and NoBrokerHood are currently being used in over 40,000 urban residential complexes in India, according to their websites. The apps are backed by marquee global investors: NoBrokerHood’s parent company, NoBroker, has raised over $200 million in funding, including $5 million from a Google fund, and MyGate has raised over $50 million from the likes of Tiger Global and Tencent. 

Shajai Jacob, managing director and country head of ApnaComplex, told Rest of World the app was simply a medium to transfer information between residents and domestic workers. “I don’t see how this information is detrimental for anybody,” said Abhishek Kumar, co-founder and COO of MyGate. NoBroker refused to comment.

Jacob and Kumar compared their notification systems to white-collar jobs, where employees use ID cards to “check-in” at corporate offices.

But unlike office employees, domestic workers — mostly women with minimal education — have no control over what the apps track. There is no app interface for domestic workers and a typically a security guard appointed by the housing complex marks their attendance on the apps. In fact, 14 domestic workers told Rest of World they did not even understand all the features of the apps.

For instance, MyGate offers a rating system akin to Uber, where residents can rank domestic workers across parameters such as attitude, punctuality, and quality of service. But unlike Uber’s drivers, workers on MyGate cannot see their ratings nor rate the employers. Rest of World found a similar rating system on ApnaComplex in Gurugram. Jacob said it was an “initial feature” that the app had removed, but then “brought [it] back in the new UI because of the fact that there was demand.” 

Calling it “a sort of information asymmetry,” Kodali noted that this system ensured that the privacy of the apartment owners was respected but not of the maids. “I don’t know if you could call it class discrimination or caste discrimination where [only] the rights of people who are residing are being respected by the platform,” he said.

MyGate’s rating system may have brought in “too much transparency,” said co-founder Kumar, adding that the system rewards high performers. MyGate, he said, plans to develop a version of the app for domestic workers. Jacob of ApnaComplex admitted that the technology “is helpful to one spectrum of the users of the app and not to the other.” He said the push to develop an app on which workers can have a voice would need to come from the managing committees of apartment complexes.

The apps collect and store personal data about domestic workers, who often lack digital literacy. The lack of specific laws governing domestic work in India, and the legal vacuum in data protection and privacy are harmful to the workers, said Anushka Jain, policy counsel at digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation. “While people in the housing society can, to some extent, speak up, domestic workers can definitely not,” Jain told Rest of World. It’s not certain if India’s proposed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 would improve matters for domestic workers, she said, as it has a provision to allow consent to be deemed for employment purposes. Under this provision, workers would continue to be surveilled, in what Jain described as a “violation of their right to privacy.”

“Once we enter, we can only leave after completing their work. If we leave and they find out, they will shout and rage and berate us,” Shivani, a domestic worker from Gurugram, told Rest of World, speaking under a pseudonym as she feared repercussions from her employers. “There’s a feeling of dread that’s taken hold.”