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Comment by ayw | Hacker News Reader

For anyone interested in solving this problem in their own business—we take privacy extremely seriously at Scale API (http://www.scaleapi.com) and implement numerous safeguards operationally and technically to ensure this doesn't happen.

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> we take privacy extremely seriously...implement numerous safeguards operationally and technically to ensure this doesn't happen

I hate that this is going to come off as snark, but a lot of tech startups make claims about executing "rigorous background checks" (Uber et al), which gets proven time and time again is not true at scale.

So what specifically do you do to ensure this? How do I trust your organization?

Just look at the reputation they've built up over the years.

The company is a year old...

Probably forgot the /s

I'll be interested in understanding the technical safeguards as well, since I am breaking my head on how to do this. One of my projects was about doing OCR on some confidential satellite images and we didn't want to outsource the OCR process solely because we couldn't figure out a scalable way to obfuscate data selectively in images. One early attempt was to recognize numbers using MNIST, get the boundary and clip that boundary with a similar sized black square. This doesn't work for all forms of text though.

What text were you reading from a satellite?

Licence plates, credit card numbers, text messages, your page number in Game of Thrones, normal spy satellite stuff.

Seriously though maybe the text wasn't in the image as much as metadata attached to it? Something like the lat/long and time of the image? I don't really know, it's a good question.

Ok these were regular land images (I think at 10m resolution) which had some text descriptions on the images. We deemed the text to be confidential enough not to outsource. Def, not spy satellite stuff :)

Are you still interested in this? I might be able to help.

I should clarify, we didn't use satellites directly, we just used the images given by a third party.

You had text that computers couldn't OCR?

On your homepage: "Scale is the easiest way to build human-powered features. It's 100x better than Mechanical Turk."

What do you mean exactly by "100x better than Mechanical Turk"?

LOL. They must also have a patent on quantifying qualitative BS while badmouthing their competition. So professional too.

Interesting. Can you describe these safeguards in any level of detail? Letting a human see clients' personal info seems fundamental to the OCR transcription process whether it's MTurk or Scale.

I'm also interested in this, looking at Scale and their jobs page I don't see that they're hiring for any of their transcribers or people to turk any of their other services, so the humans are outsourced I assume.

Traditionally, this type of work is outsourced to the Philippines sometimes India and China (depending on language skills).

The "Scale" in your name ScaleAPI seems somewhat disingenuous given the fact that you're company seems to be based purely on using humans to do things.

Or self-host it and never send out any data. (I'm offering a self-hosted solution for OCR)

Curious, how do you meet HIPAA compliance when dealing with PII? And don't tell me you don't have enough PII to be an issue. Think Social engineering.

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