Expensify & other receipt scan apps silently used people to transcribe your receipts
7Hi, I’m not sure if anyone here used Expensify or any other receipt capturing app that promised to OCR your receipts and turn them into usable text and such, but if so, it’s likely random people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program (think paid recaptcha type things) transcribed the unredacted receipts.
See this whole Twitter thread here:
If you did use Expensify, you’ll want to turn off Smart Scan, as that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to boost the accuracy by sending receipts to people to transcribe.
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IF YOU AREN’T DOING ANYTHING WRONG, WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
I use concur’s expenseit app for work. If they’re using mechanical turk they are very quick about it.
Come to think of it I’ve had a mistake so it may be straight OCR.
There was an app a while back for the visually impaired. The user would take a photo and it would come back with a description that would be read aloud. This was done in a similar fashion. You could get widely varying levels of detail from photos of the same scene like “a purse and bag on a table” vs “a brown leather purse and a green bag of decaffeinated coffee on a dark wood table”. Still an amazing use of technology (and people) to solve a problem.
@djslack
I think it’s a drawing of person.
/captionbot
@djslack
I think it’s a close up of a logo.
/captionbot
/captionbot
I think it’s a close up of a toy.
/captionbot
I think it’s a close up of a tree.
ETA: 2 out of 3, I guess …
@narfcake to be fair the shirt design is vaguely tree shaped if you only look at the edges and don’t evaluate the content.
Now I have to use them.
I am surely in profound need of having underpaid persons from Mechanical Turk following my daily receipt-based evidence of stupidity.
Also, surely, Expensify find a way to make this an additional profit center.
@f00l
How about this:
Instead of my getting paid to transcribe your receipts, you send me unredacted versions of them, and I’LL pay YOU?
@f00l Good news- they’ve heard your pleading and announced the Private Smart Scan for their Enterprise level customers- you get a private instance and get to cobble together all of the Mechanical Turk workers yourself, ideally with enough people for 24x7 coverage in 3 shifts: https://blog.expensify.com/2017/11/25/introducing-private-smartscan-on-amazon-mechanical-turk/
@mflassy
Hmmm.
How much will you pay me?
They’re seriously boring. I stopped purchasing political troll material from the Russkies some time ago, and dissolved the receipts for that in acid.
Since I’m trying too downsize the count of physical possessions, recently, they seem to be from Quiktrip.
/image wow signal arecibo
Carnegie Mellon had a web site for what it called the ESP Game. Paired players would look at the same image and type a brief description. Points were scored when both players typed the same description. There was also graphics based game where the players had to highlight a portion of the image based on, often vague, descriptions.
I never saw a practical use for that research until your post.
@eonfifty In the disclosure policy no one reads likely they are using that data they collect from people playing for research of some sort.
@eonfifty never heard of the wow signal before. this is pretty neat.
@eonfifty They think they figured that Wow! signal out . . .
http://planetary-science.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Paris_WAS_103_02.pdf
/image bummer
@Pavlov
I don’t remember ever seeing personal information on there. Maybe some companies are better about it than others.
Suck it, robots! People are still better at some things.
I reckon I’m old now. I don’t understand a bit of this thread other than there are apps to scan your receipts to them. For what purpose…I don’t know.