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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
What does it take to become the most successful AI surveillance company in 2025? If you\u2019re anything like Flock, the startup selling automatic license plate readers and facial recognition tech to cops, you don\u2019t really need much AI at all \u2014 just an army of sweatshop workers in the global south.<\/p>\n
Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media<\/a> found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of US communities, has been outsourcing its AI to gig workers located in the Philippines.<\/p>\n After accessing a cache of exposed data, 404 found documents related to annotating Flock footage, a process sometimes called \u201cAI training.\u201d Workers were tasked with jobs include categorizing vehicles by color, make, and model, transcribing license plates, and labeling various audio clips from car wrecks.<\/p>\n In US towns and cities, Flock cameras<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a growing number of cases, local police are using Flock to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveil minority communities<\/a>.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s cashier-free \u201cjust walk out\u201d stores, for example, were really just gig workers<\/a> watching American shoppers from India. The AI startup Engineer.ai, which purported to make developing code for apps \u201cas easy as ordering a pizza,\u201d was found out to be selling passing human-written code<\/a> as AI generated.<\/p>\n The difference with those examples is that those services were voluntary \u2014 powered by the exploitation of workers in the global south, yes, but with a choice to opt out on the front-end. That isn\u2019t the case with Flock, as you don\u2019t 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 \u2014 a system built on exploitation at either end.<\/p>\n