The findings raise questions about who actually has access to footage collected by herd surveillance cameras and where the people reviewing the footage might be located. Flock has become a widespread technology in the US, with its cameras present in thousands of communities that police use every day to investigate things like carjackings. Local police have also conducted several searches for ICE in the system.
Companies that use AI or machine learning regularly turn to foreign workers to train their algorithms, as labor is often cheaper than hiring domestically. But the nature of Flock’s business – creating a surveillance system that constantly monitors the activities of US residents – means the footage may be more sensitive than other AI training jobs.
Flock’s cameras continuously scan the license plate, color, brand and model of all vehicles in motion. Law enforcement is then able to search cameras across the country to see where else the vehicle has been driven. Authorities typically mine this data without a warrant, leading the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to recently sue a city that has surrounded itself with about 500 Flock cameras.
Broadly speaking, Flock uses AI or machine learning to automatically detect license plates, vehicles and people from camera footage, including what clothes they’re wearing. The Flock patent also mentions cameras that detect “race”.
Several tipsters pointed 404 Media to an exposed online panel that showed various metrics related to Flock’s AI training.
This included statistics on “annotations completed” and “annotators remaining in task queue”, annotations being notes that workers add to the reviewed footage to help train AI algorithms. Tasks include classifying vehicle make, color and type, transcription of license plates, and “audio work”. Flock recently began advertising a feature that would detect “screaming”. The panel showed that staff sometimes completed hundreds of thousands of comments over a two-day period.
The exposed panel included a list of people tasked with annotating Flock’s footage. Taking those names, 404 Media found that according to their LinkedIn and other online profiles, some were based in the Philippines.
According to the exposed material, many of these people were employed through Upwork. According to Upwork’s website, Upwork is a gig and freelance work platform where companies can hire designers and writers or get paid for “AI services.”
Tipsters also pointed to several publicly available Flock presentations that explained in more detail how workers were to classify the footage. It’s unclear what specific camera footage Flock’s AI workers are reviewing. But screenshots included in the worker guide show multiple images of vehicles with US plates, including from New York, Michigan, Florida, New Jersey and California. Other images include street signs clearly showing that the footage was taken from inside the US, and one image advertising a specific law firm in Atlanta.
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