The powerful surveillance startup Flock was caught using workers in the Philippines to collate data on US residents.

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.

  • myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zipEnglish
    26·
    24 days ago

    Noticing a trend. You had Amazon use sweatshop workers for their shopping by camera thing. You had that AI company that was just like 400 people in a sweatshop typing away. Now this.

    • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      6·
      24 days ago

      I mean, there is actual “AI” tech that exists, and isn’t just people working in sweatshops, like this: https://deeplabcut.github.io/DeepLabCut/README.html

      It’s just kind of difficult to get consistency between trials, and reliability seems to boil down to completely eliminating variability. So kind of useless outside of a lab setting (as is).

      I tend to feel like it’s more trouble than it’s worth and too unreliable (as is) to usually bother with it, but I know people who are just fellow lab rats (not broligarchs) and are super devoted to getting AI to work for their projects. Like most sectors in this country, even science is being forced to embrace AI. Regardless of if it actually makes sense for your line of work or not, the expectation is get it working or face the chopping block, and there are definitely people who are trying their hardest to really get this shit off the ground (because the alternative is be prepared to be out of a job for being obsolete).

      This is also why it’s kind of surprising to learn that even “AI” that’s simply comparing license plates from one camera to the next, is actually just due to human slave labor.

      So, do any of the broligarchs receiving these huge contracts actually believe that eventually they’ll get AI to work once enough data and money is dumped into it and the little people at the bottom figure out all the kinks for them?

      Or is it just that everybody at the top acknowledges this is a dead end, but once you’re in the secret club at the top of the food chain, and you’re making ridiculous amounts of money, your incentive is just to keep your mouth shut, keep making money, and fuck the consequences because once society collapses you’ll get to be kings of your own little monarchs anyway?

      If it is the second, and nobody at the top really believes AI is going anywhere, then what are all the giant, energy sucking data centers that are being built across the country actually for?