Mturk and fauxtomation

Did you know that Expensify's “SmartScan” technology is actually people working for Amazon Mechanical Turk? Read more.

SmartScan is presumably a selling point for Expensify, since the receipts it handles can contain sensitive personal information, like names, purchase details, email addresses, and even bank routing numbers. So it was awkward when, last week, the company was caught posting receipts to an online marketplace for freelancers so that their contents could be transcribed not by SmartScan, but by humans.

No, I do not want Alexa or Google listening in on my conversations at home.