
Expensify SmartScan uses Mturk, exposes a trove of personal information - moonka
https://twitter.com/GaryPendergast/status/933543456982450176
======
intsunny
While shocking, it appears this is not a secret by Expensify and they are up
front about it:

[https://docs.expensify.com/using-expensify-day-to-
day/smarts...](https://docs.expensify.com/using-expensify-day-to-
day/smartscan-101#how-smartscan-works)

"If our OCR technology can't read the receipt, we will make sure it's flagged
for human review by one of our secure technicians. At the end of the day,
nothing beats the human eye for ultimate quality."

~~~
clairity
that's not being up front about it. it's deliberately deceptive by using the
term "secure technicians".

to be up front, at the very least they'd have to say: "if our OCR technology
can't read your receipt, we'll post it on Amazon's Mechanical Turk where a
human will review it for us. Your receipts can be viewed and read by anyone on
the Mechanical Turk site."

obviously expensify is in a pickle because they don't want to create such
doubt in the users' minds, and so they omit this important detail.

------
social_quotient
I want to point out that there is a general NDA implied in the use of the site
[https://www.mturk.com/mturk/conditionsofuse](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/conditionsofuse)

If a worker/turk is going to break the NDA here then I think it’s fair to
assume anyone could (assuming they hire 1000 global contractors for $5/hr).
What’s the material difference? Other than here we saw how the sausage is
made... (Cause someone tweeted it)

Thoughts?

------
buryat
In 2013 their Director of Strategy and Marketing said that they don't use
Mechanical Turk and use their own system

[https://archive.is/RkQOv](https://archive.is/RkQOv)

