Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.
After accessing a cache of exposed data, 404 found documents related to annotating Flock footage, a process sometimes called “AI training.” Workers were tasked with jobs include categorizing vehicles by color, make, and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.
In US towns and cities, Flock cameras maintained by local businesses and municipal agencies form centralized surveillance networks for local police. They constantly scan for car license plates, as well as pedestrians, who are categorized based on their clothing, and possibly by factors like gender and race.
In a growing number of cases, local police are using Flock to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveil minority communities.
It isn’t clear where all the Flock annotation footage came from, but screenshots included in the documents for data annotators showed license plates from New York, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, and California.
Flock joins the ranks of other fast-moving AI companies that have resorted to low-paid international labor to bring their product to market. Amazon’s cashier-free “just walk out” stores, for example, were really just gig workers watching American shoppers from India. The AI startup Engineer.ai, which purported to make developing code for apps “as easy as ordering a pizza,” was found out to be selling passing human-written code as AI generated.
The difference with those examples is that those services were voluntary — powered by the exploitation of workers in the global south, yes, but with a choice to opt out on the front-end. That isn’t the case with Flock, as you don’t have to consent to end up in the panopticon. In other words, for a growing number of Americans, a for-profit company is deciding who gets watched, and who does the watching — a system built on exploitation at either end.
Yeah I don't understand how a private company deploying cameras on the side of roads is even legal.
Does that mean I can build solar powered raspberry pi units with cameras that do the same thing and pepper them around the country without question?
Thus has been the norm for years. Those red light and speed cameras in your town are also owned by private companies and it happens because these leaders are the type of people who go to Bing and type in "google" or who print their emails out only to scan them back into their computer in order to "save them" and these slimy company salespeople saw them coming from a mile away.
It means you should definitely try! And make a documentary.