Expensify’s “smart” scanning technology was secretly aided by humans
Expensify is a software company that automates the painful task of compiling expense reports. It does this using “SmartScan” technology that can supposedly glean details like merchant, date, and price from a picture of a receipt.
Since it started in 2009, Expensify has raised just shy of $30 million from investors including Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. The company claims to process billions of dollars a year, and reimburse millions of dollars a day, aided by SmartScan and its investments into “automation in the expense reporting process.” Its 4.5 million users and 300,000 corporate clients include some of today’s hottest startups, such as Uber, Square, Snapchat, and Instacart.
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.
Rochelle LaPlante is a worker for Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online hub where an army of Amazon-approved independent contractors complete “human intelligence tasks” (“HITS”) such as transcriptions, image tagging, and line-editing, usually for a couple cents. The name Mechanical Turk alludes to the “automaton” chess player that astounded Europeans in the late 18th century, but was later revealed to be an elaborate hoax controlled by a hidden human chess master.
