Can crowdsourcing be used for evil?
Law enforcement officials in Texas have installed a network of CCTV cameras to monitor key areas along that state's 1900-kilometre-long border with Mexico. To help screen the footage, a website lets anyone log in to watch a live feed from a border camera and report suspicious activity. A similar system called Internet Eyes, which pays online viewers to spot shoplifters from in-store camera feeds, is set to launch in the UK in 2010. An Iranian website is offering rewards for identifying people in photos taken during protests over June's elections.
And:
In a speculative example, Zittrain has calculated that, assuming a population in Iran of around 72 million people, it would cost around $17,000 for the government to use Mechanical Turk to identify any arbitrary person's picture, without the users that are doing it realising the cause they have enlisted in.
The scheme would show "Turkers" a photo of a protest, or just faces extracted from one, along with five randomly chosen photos from the country's ID card database, and asked to say whether or not there is any match.
Users would receive a few cents each time they contribute. Furthermore, Zittrain says that such a task might be made into an addicting game, similar to Google's image labeller.
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