Security robots are slowly becoming a more common sight in malls, offices, and public spaces. But while these bots are often presented as replacements for human security guards — friendly robots on patrol — they’re collecting far more data than humans could, suggesting they’re more like mobile surveillance machines than conventional guards.

A new report from OneZerosheds some light on the scope of the data collection, featuring marketing material and contracts between Knightscope and various city councils. Both show that the main purpose of these robots is gathering data, including license plates, facial recognition scans, and the presence of nearby mobile devices. It’s the sort of constant low-level surveillance that only a machine can perform.

Exactly what each robot collects differs, as Knightscope leases its bots rather than selling them outright, tailoring each contract to customers’ needs. But it’s a fair bet that if you’ve seen one of these machines in person, it’s recorded your presence in one way or another.

As an internal report by California’s Huntington Park Police Department (HPPD) published by MuckRockbackin August noted, “Knightscope’s secret to the K5 robot is simply sensors — lots of them.”

HPPD started leasing a Knightscope K5 robot to patrol parks and buildings this June, and the robot soon made headlines when a passerby pressed its emergency button to report a nearby fight, to no effect. According to NBC News, the bot ignored the woman and continued moving down its preprogrammed path “humming an intergalactic tune” and pausing to tell visitors to “please keep the park clean.”

Stories like this suggest that, as a replacement for human security guards (people who can respond intelligently and spontaneously to emergency situations), Knightscope’s machines are lacking. But as surveillance devices, they have a lot of potential.

The report from the HPPD notes that the robots can identify nearby smartphones over an unknown range, recording their MAC and IP addresses. In Knightscope marketing material published by OneZero, this is a central part of the company’s sales pitch, with one slide telling customers: “90%+ of Adults Have Smartphones And Use WiFi When Available.” Recording the presence of cellphones is a subtle form of surveillance

Scanning phones is a subtle form of surveillance with a far-reaching impact. It’s not as invasive as identifying someone by name, but it can be a rich source of information, telling you a lot about someone’s daily routine, like how often they visit a certain area and how long they stay there. As Knightscope says, it can also be used as a proxy to keep out unwanted individuals: just create a whitelist of approved devices, and scan for unfamiliar ones.

It’s a job these robots are well-suited to. They’re dogged and consistent, with the patience of a machine. They can run 24 hours a day, have infrared cameras to see in the dark, and are, in a way, are less conspicuous than humans performing similar surveillance duties. A robot might be a novelty the first few times you see it, but machines become invisible, blending into the background while continuing to scoop up data.

Knightscope’s robots certainly aren’t physically capable enough to apprehend wrongdoers. They can’t run down criminals or even navigate stairs. And when they’ve made headlines in the past, it’s usually for some sort of pratfall, like when one of their bots drowned itself in a fountain or when another knocked down a toddler in a mall.

So what are they good for? Knightscope maintains that its robots are essentially supplementary devices, meant to compensate for a lack of personnel, to spot trouble and call the police. But in an age when automated systems are replacing humans in more and more fields (think: algorithms making decisions in areas like hiring and benefits), it’s likely they’ll gradually take on a more prominent role, leaning on their surveillance skills.

As roaming security cameras, they’ll continue to make an impact. As John Santagate, an analyst at IDC, told Recode last year, these robots can’t respond to emergencies, but they can intimidate people. “I use the analogy of the police car parked at the corner,” said Santagate. “Even when no one is in it, people around the car adjust their behavior.”

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Over the past decade, web-scale companies have shown a dramatic commitment to containers. In 2006, Google paved the way for this technological innovation, as engineers Paul Manage and Rohit Seith defined and implemented software containers. Almost a decade on, the tech giant released Kubernetes – an open source version of the solution that has proven invaluable. According to Google, it is now running two billion containers/week at a rate of 3,300/sec.

Yet, Google is not the only one to embrace containers. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix quickly followed suit. Therefore, the question has to be asked – if some of the world’s most innovative tech powerhouses are demonstrating a dramatic commitment to containers, why aren’t you?

The power of containers

So, what is it that makes containers such a desirable solution? This innovation is the fuel for the digital evolution of entire business sectors in both emerging and conservative companies. In the digital business era, innovation happens through highly recurring deployments of both new and improved software. That’s what Amazon does 50 million times a year, which in turn has made them into a dominant retail juggernaut. Every second, new retail services are deployed and existing ones incrementally improved at a rate of change that boggles the mind.

Let’s compare this rate of evolution with that of a corporation still depending on legacy applications. Even when its mainframe infrastructure provides a back-end function for digital internet services, how many times per year are its legacy systems upgraded? Best-in-class organizations do this once a quarter. Clearly, these companies are playing in a completely different game than the web-scale companies. They can never catch up. It’s like trying to race a rocket with a truck – never a fair race!

However, innovative approaches to loosen the shackles of legacy infrastructures are already being successfully implemented. For example, Software Defined Mainframe (SDM) is designed to enable companies with legacy mainframe applications to take advantage of the scale and agility of containers, exposing existing business logic as services or microservices. The web-scale giants of today are so fast in rolling out new or updated services because they are designed to be small to very small. Microservices are small pieces of software, designed to specialize in a small number or even a single business function.

The boundaries and dependencies of these microservices are extremely explicit and clear; they are defined by their communications with other microservices over the network. Amazon has recently disclosed that several hundred microservices are used during even the simplest purchase on its website.

Agility

These explicit and clear boundaries dramatically reduce the scale of testing – it becomes much easier. A minimal to single function enable automated testing to yield dramatic improvements in productivity. How else could anyone achieve the scale the web giants are getting? The usual fear of going to production that is associated with legacy systems is a result of the queasiness over testing.

Many mainframe shops are never quite sure if they’ve tested the whole thing because these systems are so monolithic and complex. With a simpler and limited function piece of software, supported completely by automated testing solutions, companies are able to roll out changes in a continuous delivery mode, incurring limited risk due to the smaller footprint of these microservices. Legacy mainframe applications are quite different. These large, complex monolithic systems, with a plethora of programs, each highly dependent on each other must be tested in their entirety over many weeks in order to find the “bug in the haystack”.

Modernity

To embark on the path to modern IT, businesses in 2017 must be able to enable these legacy systems to participate in a more digital and agile world. This can be done by transforming monoliths into a myriad of independent microservices, without any changes to the source code.

By allowing existing COBOL Commarea programs to become a microservice that are hyper-connected with new applications written for mobile and social networks, innovation can occur on top of the cornerstones of the current business.

Exposing these legacy “crown jewels” as microservices enables them to be reused for modern digital business solutions. For example, banks with tens of thousands or millions of lines of COBOL that are used to determine the value of their banking customers, can reuse these functions, “as-is” and not have to spend the time and money to rewrite them in Java or another modern computing language. Solutions exist to enable organizations to isolate the legacy programs providing this “customer valuation” function as a separate microservice that can be readily reused by the evolving application portfolio.

By leveraging automatic application analysis techniques, IT teams are able to unambiguously understand all programs required to provide the business function and expose them as a microservice. Software upgrades are the fuel of innovation in the era of digital business. But first, businesses must find a solution that leverages the vast amount of business energy laying in legacy software assets into very dynamic and fast-evolving services, aimed at playing on par, with the web giants.

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