Per the app stores description, the application called Premise is:
If you need a quick and easy way to make some extra cash, the Premise App will pay you to take pictures of products found in your area. You can also complete tasks online if you don’t feel like leaving your home. This is a great way for those in between jobs or who just want to supplement their income.
What Is Premise?
Premise is a free mobile app that is currently only available for Android devices. They’re willing to pay you to do research on everyday items in your community by taking pictures. Most of these pictures consist of the product itself along with the price tag in order to constantly keep accurate data on the prices of products.
That was then, now the app is suspended, because defense contractors were using the app to send people in Ukraine to take photos of items, that turned out to be military in nature, and put the lives of the people taking the photos in danger. The Ukraine government asked to have the app removed before someone got killed.
So what do you think, has the outsourcing crazy, self employed companies gone far enough, when we seem to outsourced intelligence gathering to civilians, putting them endanger. The Wall Street Journal article had more details on the incident (but its behind a paywall) (but this is its opening statement:
U.S.-based app Premise, which has some U.S. military contracts, hires some gig-workers with smartphones in geopolitical hotspots to gather open-source information.
Per Slashdots article :
Ukrainian gig workers were doing was harvesting data for a U.S. Defense Department-funded research project. Descartes Labs, a government contractor that works with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, hired Premise to have its gig workers gauge how accurately the company's satellite algorithms were performing, the people said. Could they, for example, accurately tell barley from wheat in photos taken from space? Descartes's work was funded by DARPA, a research arm of the Pentagon, a Defense Department spokesperson said. Descartes declined to comment. Based in San Francisco, Premise is one of a number of companies offering a service that uses iPhone and Android smartphones around the world as tools for gathering intelligence and commercial information from afar, sometimes without the users knowing specifically who they are working for. The business model of companies like Premise has prompted questions about the safety and propriety of enlisting such people for government work --especially in potential or active conflict zones.
