Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
What does it take to become the most successful AI surveillance company in 2025? If you’re like Flock, a startup selling automated license plate readers and facial recognition technology to police, you don’t really need a lot of AI — just an army of sweatshop workers in the global south.
explosive new reporting From 404 media Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, was found to be outsourcing its AI to gig workers based in the Philippines.
After the exposed data reaches the cache, 404 Relevant documents were found by annotating flock footage, a process sometimes called “AI training”. The tasks the workers were assigned included classifying vehicles by color, make and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.
In American towns and cities, swarm cameras maintained by local businesses and municipal agencies create centralized surveillance networks for local police. They constantly scan car license plates as well as pedestrians, who are classified based on their clothing and possibly on factors such as. gender and caste,
With cases on the rise, local police are using Flock to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents keep an eye on minority communities,
It’s unclear where all the Flock annotation footage came from, but screenshots included in the data annotators’ documents showed license plates from New York, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, and California.
Flock joins the ranks of other fast-moving AI companies that have turned to low-wage international labor to bring their product to market. For example, Amazon’s cashier-free “Just Walk Out” stores were actually reasonable. gig workers Looking at US buyers from India. AI startup Engineer.AI, which claimed to make developing code for apps “as easy as ordering a pizza”, was found to be selling passes. human-written code As soon as AI arose.
The difference in those examples is that those services were voluntary – driven by the exploitation of workers in the global South, yes, but with an option to opt out at the front-end. This is not the case with Flock, as you do not have to consent to join the Panopticon. In other words, for a growing number of Americans, a for-profit company is deciding who gets monitored and who is watching — a system built on exploitation on both ends.
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