Over the weekend I found out that Expensify, a service I use for my company, outsources a feature to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Expensify handles the management of business expenses, which for a company like ours can be problematic as we do a lot of travel when deploying services. The issue is that the feature, the “smart scanning” of receipts, could potentially expose confidential data to third parties. As a user of Expensify, this bothers me.

Expensify touts “SmartScan” as:

As background, SmartScan is the patented, award-winning technology that underpins our “fire and forget” design for expense management. When you get a receipt, rather than stuffing it into your pocket to dread for later, just:

1. Take your phone out of your pocket
2. SmartScan the receipt
3. Put your phone back in your pocket

What they never told us is that if their “patented, award-winning technology” can’t read your receipt, they send it to the Mechanical Turk, which in turn presents it to a human being who will interpret the receipt manually. The thing is, we have no control over who will see that information, which could be confidential. For example, when I post a receipt for an airline ticket, it may include my record locater, ticket number and itinerary, all of which are sensitive.

This apparently never occurred to the folks at Expensify. Take this Quora answer from Ryan Schaffer, listed as Expensify Director of Marketing & Strategy:

Also, its worth mentioning, they don’t see anything that can personally identify you. They see a date, merchant, and amount. Receipts, by their very nature, are intended be thrown away and are explicitly non-sensitive. Anyone looking at a receipt isunable to tell if that receipt is from me, you, your neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It seems that Mr. Schaffer may limit his business expenses to the occasional coffee at Starbucks, but for the rest of us it is rarely that limited. For someone whose job is to perfect dealing with receipts, his view is pretty myopic.

For examples of what Expensify exposes, take a look at this tweet by Gary Pendergast.

It is also worth noting that it appears Expensify does its business on the Mechanical Turk as “Fluffy Cloud” instead of Expensify, which strikes me as a little disingenuous.

In a blog post this morning the company addressed this:

As you might imagine, doing this is easier said than done. Given the enormous scale and 24/7 nature of this task, we have agents positioned around the world to hand off this volume from timezone to timezone. Most of the US team is located in Ironwood, MI or Portland, OR (where we have offices and can train in person). Most of the international team is in Nepal or Honduras (where we work with a third-party provider to manage the on-site logistics). But regardless of the location, every single agent is bound by a confidentiality agreement, and subject to severe repercussions if that agreement is broken.

But if this were true, why are random people on Twitter announcing that they can see this data? Are they relying on the Amazon agreement with the people working as part of the Mechanical Turk? That doesn’t instill much confidence in me. But then in the same blog post they double down, and suggest that if you want extra security, you can just set up your own staff as part of the Mechanical Turk:

1. You hire a 24/7 team of human transcription agents.
         o For the fastest processing we suggest staffing three separate shifts — or daytime shifts in three different offices around the world. Otherwise your receipts might lag for many hours before getting processed.

2. They apply to Amazon Mechanical Turk for an account. Be aware that this is a surprisingly involved process, including:
         o The agent must sign up using their actual personal Amazon account. If your account doesn’t have an adequate history of purchases (each of which implies a successful credit card billing transaction and package delivery) or other activity, you will be rejected.
         o The agent must provide their full name, address, and bank account information for reimbursement. Amazon verifies this with a variety of techniques (eg, confirm that your IP is in the country you say you are, verify the bank account is owned by the name and address provided, full criminal background check), and if anything doesn’t add up, you will be rejected.
         o Rejection is final. It requires such an abundance of verifiable documentation (most notably being an active Amazon account with a long history) that you can’t just create a new account and try again.
         o There is no apparent appeals process. Accordingly, I would recommend confirming before hiring that the candidate can pass Amazon Mechanical Turk’s many strict controls because we have no ability to override their judgement.

3. You notify us of the “workerID” of each of your authorized agents.
         o Though you are not obligated to share your staff’s identity with us directly, your staff will still be obligated to follow the Expensify terms of services. Failure to comply with our terms will result in an appropriate response, starting with immediate banning by our automated systems, ranging up to our legal team subpoenaing you (or failing that, Amazon) for the identity of the agent to press charges directly.

4. We will create a “Qualification” for your “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) that ensures only your agents will see your receipts.

5. Your staff will use the Amazon Mechanical Turk interface to discover and process your employee’s receipts.

That’s the solution? This is what passes for security at Expensify? Hire three shifts of employees all using verified personal Amazon accounts and then you can be sure your confidential data is kept confidential?

Wouldn’t it just be easier to create a small webapp that would present receipts to people in a company directly without going through the Mechanical Turk? Heck, why not just bounce it back out to you – it isn’t that great of a chore.

Plus, basically, if you don’t do this Expensify is saying they can’t keep your information secure.

This is what frustrates me the most about “the Cloud”. Everyone is in such a rush to deploy solutions that they just don’t think about security. Hey, it’s only receipts, right? Look what I was able to find out with just a discarded boarding pass – receipts can have much more information. And this is from a company that is supposed to be focused on dealing with expenses.

I demand two things from companies I trust with our information in the cloud: security and transparency. It looks like Expensify has neither.

I will be moving us away from Expensify. If you know of any decent solutions, let me know. Xpenditure looks pretty good, and since they are based in the EU perhaps they understand privacy a little better than they do in San Francisco.