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.
AI doesn’t exist, it’s just a bunch of dudes in India.
AI = Actually Indians
Haha, I love that!
It’s dudes in the Philippines this time, actually.
AI = actually Indians
That headline just keeps getting bleaker as it goes.
Let the unregulated “free” (for some!) market ruled by the winners decide.
The billionaires are the winners and the deciders that our wonderful free market system has given us.
/s
The whole world knows already that Us companies are doing such sh*t all the time.
But it never ceases to surprise me how Us americans themselves suddenly cry “scandal” as if they hadn’t known already that their companies are doing such sh*t all the time.
I mean there are legit companies doing good work that get passed over all the time.
How did these 3 guys get hundreds of millions in government contracts for a product that didn’t even exist.
And not only did it not exist, they were demanding everybody let them violate their privacy so that their non-existent product could “end crime.”
I’ll just come out and say it, the “scandal” imo isn’t the company was a fraud part. The scandal is that people within the government wanted so badly to amp up surveillance and the police state within the U.S. they just went ahead and dumped all this money into A.I. that didn’t actually exist because “A.I. is already here and it will fix everything, and even if you don’t want it, too fucking bad.”
Like it was never that the government thought A.I. tech was that important, or the future, or whatever bullshit. They’ve just realized the tech industry allows them the ability to spy on people, control information, and make a shit ton of money doing it.
It’s not fraud if you have political connections.
Yeah, the only surprise any more is whether it’s just going to be the usual fraud, or some new creative type of scam I haven’t seen yet.
The term “AI” has been misused and misrepresented so much that it’s more of an aesthetic than a technology now.
The main thing flock is really supposed to do is capture and match pictures of license plates at different locations. It’s not even complex.
So how tf did they get the green light for the first government contract if they never even had that capability?
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.
Either they conned the government org in charge of purchasing it, or that org just didn’t care enough to look deeper. They got a professional-looking demo that made it look like the tech worked, and signed the contract without a second thought.
The history of the organization seems very odd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety
It began as a side project in which the three co-founders built their first video surveillance cameras by hand around Langley’s dining room table. When a DeKalb County detective told Langley that his camera product had helped with solving a home break-in, Langley called the two other co-founders and told them to quit their jobs.
What?? How did a detective use it to solve a crime? Who was he? And based off of this one dude you all 3 just quit your jobs??? What??
Then we just jump ahead to 2022 and these cameras that didn’t even work had raised over $380 million in venture funding?
Then by the next year they were being used to sub for actual police due to a shortage of police officers?
So they just go from the Hardy Boys help solve a mystery in Georgia in 2017 and then suddenly by 2023 Marc Andreesen (big surprise) is suddenly funnelling millions into their business.
Oh, good, this citation will probably help make clear what the fuck actually happened between 2017 and 2023: Flock Safety. “Media Kit: Our Founding Story”. Flock Safety. Retrieved April 8, 2022.
Truly fucked up !
I have to give the broligarchs credit for always somehow managing to leave me stunned. Every time I learn some unbelievable bullshit like this, it’s like falling in hate all over again.
As we leave the stagnation of society behind in the ruins of regulations and democracy that only held us back, and the technocratic elite steer us full speed ahead through this “Renaissance” we are truly blessed to be forced to live through, the line between technology and magic continues to blur…
Or maybe it’s just 700 sweatshop workers in a trenchcoat. Who’s to say?
Surprise surprise. 🙄
It’s not legal where I live, but that didn’t stop me from fighting back.
I’m not down with this surveillance state we’re moving into.
Many states have made these illegal. I got pulled over for one of these in my blue state almost two decades ago.
