Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build Its Surveillance AI

Flock, the automatic license plate reader and AI-powered camera company, uses foreign workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material that tells workers how to view and categorize footage, including images of people and cars in the United StatesAccording to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company.

The findings raise questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people viewing the footage may be based. Flock has become a pervasive technology in the US, with its cameras present in thousands of communities that police use every day to investigate things like carjackings. The local police have too done numerous searches for ICE in the system.

Companies that use AI or machine learning routinely turn to foreign workers to train their algorithms, often because the labor is cheaper than hiring domestically. But the nature of Flock's business — creating a surveillance system that constantly monitors the movements of US residents — means that footage can be more sensitive than other jobs for AI training.

Flock's cameras continuously scan the number plate, color, make and model of all vehicles that drive by. Law enforcement officers can then search cameras nationwide to see where else a car has been driven. Authorities typically dig through this data without a warrant, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation recently sue a city blanketed in almost 500 Flock cameras.

In general, Flock uses AI or machine learning to recognize license plates, cars, vehicles, and peopleincluding what clothes they wear, from camera footage. A Flock patent also mentions “race” detecting cameras.

Multiple tipsters pointed 404 Media to an exposed online panel that showed various metrics associated with Flock's AI training.

It included figures on “annotations completed” and “annotator tasks remaining in queue,” with annotations being the notes workers add to viewed footage to train AI algorithms. Tasks include categorizing car brands, colors and types, transcribing license plates, and “audio tasks.” Flock recently started advertising a feature that will detect “screaming”. The panel showed that workers sometimes completed thousands of annotations over two-day periods.

The exposed panel included a list of people tasked with annotating Flock's images. Taking these names, 404 Media found that some were in the Philippines, according to their LinkedIn and other online profiles.

Many of these people were employed through Upwork, according to the exposed material. Upwork is a gig and freelance work platform where companies can hire or pay designers and writers for “AI services,” according to Upwork's website.

The tipsters also pointed to several publicly available Flock presentations that explained in more detail how workers should categorize the images. It's not clear what specific camera footage Flock's AI workers are viewing. But screenshots included in the worker's guides show many images of vehicles with US plates, including in New York, Michigan, Florida, New Jersey and California. Other images include road signs that clearly show the footage was taken from the US, and one image contains an ad for a specific law firm in Atlanta.