Crowd Bots

Users of crowdworking platforms (such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) are battling a new enemy – an army of bots. These crowdsourcing platforms utilize human intelligence to perform tasks that machines are unable to handle reliably, including tagging and classifying images, audio editing, human translation services and completing surveys (to name just a few). But researchers have noticed a surge in the number of questionable responses and other tell-tale signs that bots are corrupting their data.

For example, in one survey, a researcher reported that half of the 578 respondents had GPS coordinates that were identical to another respondent. Fifty of them were traced to a statue in Buffalo, New York, and several others to the middle of a lake in Kansas. Disturbingly (but perhaps predictably) the problem is growing quickly – from 5 to 10 percent a few months ago to more than 50 percent today.

All of this means that we need to get smarter when it comes to these tools and the data we collect from them. As always…it’s not the technology, it’s how you use it!