From the Philippines to Colombia, low-paid workers label training data for AI models used by the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
In 2016, Oskarina Fuentes got a tip from a friend that seemed too good to be true. Her life in Venezuela had become a struggle: Inflation had hit 800 percent under President Nicolás Maduro, and the 26-year-old Fuentes had no stable job and was balancing multiple side hustles to survive.
Her friend told her about Appen, an Australian data services company that was looking for crowdsourced workers to tag training data for artificial intelligence algorithms. Most internet users will have done some form of data labeling: identifying images of traffic lights and buses for online captchas. But the algorithms powering new bots that can pass legal exams, create fantastical imagery in seconds, or remove harmful content on social media are trained on datasets—images, video, and text—labeled by gig economy workers in some of the world’s cheapest labor markets.
Appen’s clients have included Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and the company’s 1 million contributors are just a part of a vast, hidden industry. The global data collection and labeling market was valued at $2.22 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to $17.1 billion by 2030, according to consulting firm Grand View Research. As Venezuela slid into an economic catastrophe, many college-educated Venezuelans like Fuentes and her friends joined crowdsourcing platforms like Appen.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) questioned Robin Dunn Marcos, Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, about the ongoing child migrant crisis at the southern border and the 85,000 children that the Biden Administration has lost track of.
“Do you really think that you are helping these children by releasing them to labor traffickers and yes, sex traffickers?” asked Senator Hawley. “85,000 children whom you have no contact with and your answer is—we gave them a presentation before we turned them over to these people who are exploiting them on a scale not seen in this country for 100 years.”
When Senator Hawley pressed Director Dunn Marcos to say exactly how many migrant children the department had released into the United States and was also currently in contact with, the Director had no response.
A bipartisan group of 42 attorneys general is suing Meta, alleging that features on its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms are addictive and are aimed at kids and teens, the group announced Tuesday. The support from so many state attorneys general of different political backgrounds indicates a significant legal challenge to Meta’s business.
Meta is now facing multiple lawsuits on this issue in several districts. Attorneys general from 33 states filed a federal suit against Meta in the Northern District of California, while nine additional attorneys general are filing in their own states, according to a press release from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office. Besides New York, the states that filed the federal suit include California, Colorado, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin.
The lawsuits are another demonstration of the bipartisan priority state law enforcers have placed on protecting kids and teens from online harm.
“This is a tough time in America,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said at a press conference after the lawsuit was filed. “We have polarization the likes of which we have not seen since the Civil War. And so for all of the attorneys general from both parties, people who frequently disagree very vocally and very publicly, to all come together and to move in the same direction, I think that says something.”
The pornography industry fuels the demand for human sex trafficking, rescue experts warn.
FOX News Digital talked to Operation Underground Railroad and Fight To End Exploitation, which devote their resources to helping victims of abuse, and they revealed that videos of sexual abuse often end up on pornography websites to unsuspecting audiences.
“There’s no such thing as innocent pornography, harmless pornography,” Matt Osborne, president and COO of Operation Underground Railroad told FOX News Digital. “You’ll never be able to know whether the pictures you’re looking at and the videos you’re watching….. (were) with a consenting individual or not, whether it was with a minor or not.”
Rachel Harrison, advocacy coordinator of Fight to End Exploitation, said there are “a lot of issues with abuse videos getting uploaded or made during the course of trafficking.”
“Pornography and sex trafficking (are) very much intertwined if you think about it, unfortunately, kind of like as a business model for traffickers,” Harrison said. “They’re doing it because they can make a lot of money. … So, for them to diversify their revenue, they’re not only exploiting people in person, but they’re also, with the advancement of technology and just social media and how everybody is online, you see a lot of pornography that’s being made in conjunction with people who are trafficked.”
‘THEY GROOM THESE KIDS’: PARENTS NEED TO BE AWARE OF HOW SEX TRAFFICKERS USE THE INTERNET
The rise in porn use has also driven up the demand for children, Osborne revealed.
“It used to be adults,” he said. “There always were those preying on children, but we’re seeing an uptick in minors being exploited. (There are) a lot of reasons for that, but one is, this addiction to pornography, this oversexualization of our culture.”
On today’s show, security expert Bill Stanton talks about how to keep families safe in America as we face national security threats from open borders, criminal cartels, escalation of human trafficking, cyber threats and increased crime in the streets across America.GUEST OVERVIEW: Bill Stanton is a widely recognized and highly respected expert in the field of safety and security. As a Private Investigator and security consultant to major television news shows, Bill has more than 35 years experience in safety, investigations and law enforcement. Bill began his career as an officer with the NYPD, but was forced to retire early after being injured in the line of duty. He transitioned quickly to the private sector, where he built his reputation specializing in executive protection, as well as safety and security consulting and investigations. His in-depth experience, dynamic personality, and tireless commitment have established Bill as a leading spokesperson on the topics of safety and security. Bill has co-authored both fiction and non-fiction books including the novel Badge of Evil and the non-fiction guide Prepared not Scared. He has been the safety and security contributor on NBC News, The Today Show, ABC News, and Good Morning America. Bill also regularly appears on Dr. Oz, Rachel Ray, Wendy Williams and major news networks including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and Telemundo.
A Queens family was found guilty Thursday of running a horrific years-long underage prostitution operation and bribing a small-town cop with free sexual services to look the other way while they trafficked their teenage victims.
Luz Elvira Cardona, 35, her partner Jose Facundo Zarate Morales, 34, her mother Blanca Hernandez, 53, and her mom’s partner, Roberto Cesar Cid Dominguez, 60, were all convicted Thursday after a four-week jury trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Cardona and her relatives were so callous that she turned her own niece into a victim — a 15-year-old girl who wanted to come to the U.S. from Mexico in 2007 to get a job at as a cleaner and start a better life, federal prosecutors said.
The time is now. I’ll be rallying up in our state capitol, Albany at 1PM ET on October 21 but there are several rallies going on across the United States and other countries simultaneously.
Our children are not for sale. Join us. Learn more. Also take a listen to my Warriors interview with Seak Smith, General and Founder of the MOM ARMY.
Community creates change. #BeAWarrior
Please watch. Be aware. Learn more. Let us push Congress to designate the cartels “terrorist organizations” immediately. #BeAWarrior #Border911
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