I recently posted a rant on how a vendor we use, Expensify, appeared to be exposing confidential data to workers with the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. In response to the general outcry, they posted a detailed explanation on their blog.

It did little to change my mind.

So apparently what happened is that they used to use the Mechanical Turk from 2009 to 2012, so if you we a customer back then your information was disclosed to those third party workers. Then they stopped, supposedly using some other, similar, in-house system.

But, some genius there decided that the best way for certain customers to insure their receipts were truly private was to have them use the Mechanical Turk with their own staff. I covered that in my first post and it is so complex it hardly registers as a solution.

Of course, they decided to test this new “solution” starting the day before the American Thanksgiving holiday. This was done using receipts from “non-paying customers”. While we pay to use the service (not for much longer), if you were trying it out for free your receipts were exposed to Mechanical Turk workers. Heh, if you aren’t paying for the product you are the product. The post goes on to talk about the security of the Mechanical Turk service, which was surprising because they went on and on about how they didn’t use it.

What really angered me was this paragraph:

The company was away with our families and trying hard to be responsive, while also making the most of a rare opportunity to be with our loved ones. Accordingly, this vacuum of information provided by the company was filled with a variety of well-intentioned but inaccurate theories that generated a bunch of compounding, exaggerated fears. As a family-friendly business we try hard to separate work life from home life, and in this case that separation came at a substantial cost.

Well, boo hoo. If you truly cared about your employees you wouldn’t start a major beta test the day before a big holiday. I spent my holiday worrying about my employees’ personal data possibly being exposed through the Expensify service. Thanks for that.

What pisses me off the most is this condescending Silicon Valley speak that their lack of transparency is somehow our fault. That our fears are just “exaggerated”. When Ryan Schaffer posted on Quora that nothing personal is included on receipts, he demonstrated a tremendous lack of understanding about something on which he should be an expert. As they turn this new leaf and try to be more transparent, I noticed he deleted his answer from the Quora question.

Smells like a cover up to me.

Look, I know that being from North Carolina I can’t possibly understand all the nuances of the brain-heavy Valley, but if Expensify truly does have a “patented, award-winning” methodology for scanning receipts, why don’t they just make that available to their customers instead of using the Turk? This long-winded defense of the Turk seems like they are protesting too much. Something doesn’t make sense here.

I’ve told my folks to stop using SmartScan and that we would move away from Expensify at the end of the year. If you use, or are planning to use, Expensify you should deeply consider whether or not this is a company you want to associate with and if they will act in your best interests.

I decided the answer was “no”.