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.
But it’s especially infuriating that this company has received so many government contracts from ICE and all over the U.S., and in some cases literally just gone into towns and put cameras up without permission. Then refused to get around to taking them down in some cases, so towns just started covering them up with trash bags.
Its like an entire business model where some creepers with a cardboard box pretend lemonade stand just decided one day to start selling pretend AI instead. And we just let them? Who fucking signed off on this?
Who is it that even helped them get their foot in the door in the first place? Who was the coked out billionaire who apparently just fucking picked their name from a list he glanced at for 5 minutes on his way to rehab? Somebody needs to find that person, and we all need to be allowed to give him a swift public kick in the ass.
Hold on my dude,
I never said I’m for this surveilance bullshit.
Fuck AI and Fuck ICE.
At the same time please take the time to read and interpret comments properly as you’re directing your justified rage at the wrong person.
Wait, what? I was just making a joke.
Unless you are the coked out billionaire? In that case I would like to know what you were thinking when you vouched for these people.
I was just pointing out it’s definitely going to contribute to the bubble popping, but it’s even worse than other AI companies bc it was mainly government contracts (which means they’ll probably still be getting funded for the foreseeable future even while other companies go under).
It’s insane they were ever allowed to receive a government contract for tech that didn’t even exist, so I would just really like to know how that happened? Like legally how could this have happened if not for somebody in some position of power helping these people get their foot in the door.