Expensify
One notorious use of Amazon Mechanical Turk was Expensify in 2017. The expense reporting company had a feature where you could take a picture of a receipt and expense it for you. The app would automatically verify that it was an expense compliant with your employer’s rules, and file it in the appropriate location. Can you guess what happens?
When the AI failed, Expensify said it used a team of secure technicians to file the expense on your behalf. That turned out to be Amazon Mechanical Turk workers in some circumstances, according to receipts spotted by Twitter users. That means real humans were viewing private information such as credit card numbers, full names, addresses, food orders, and more. It’s unclear how many of these expense reports were filed by humans.
