Gig app gathering data for US military, others prompts safety concerns

But for one contributor, the job turned out to be anything but ordinary when one of the fields turned out to lie next to a military checkpoint. The contributor was chased off by armed soldiers, according to people familiar with the matter. The app’s owner, Premise Data Corp., said it immediately deleted the task from its platform after learning of the military checkpoint.

What that and other Ukrainian gig workers were doing was harvesting data for a U.S. Defense Department-funded research project. Descartes Labs, a government contractor that works with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, hired Premise to have its gig workers gauge how accurately the company’s satellite algorithms were performing, the people said. Could they, for example, accurately tell barley from wheat in photos taken from space? Descartes’s work was funded by DARPA, a research arm of the Pentagon, a Defense Department spokesperson said. Descartes declined to comment.

Based in San Francisco, Premise is one of a number of companies offering a service that uses iPhone and Android smartphones around the world as tools for gathering intelligence and commercial information from afar, sometimes without the users knowing specifically who they are working for. The business model of companies like Premise has prompted questions about the safety and propriety of enlisting such people for government work—especially in potential or active conflict zones.

Such safety concerns were on display last week when the Ukrainian ministry of defense accused the company’s gig workers of being agents of Russia after false reports circulated on social media that Moscow was using the app to mark targets for military strikes. Premise said its work in Ukraine was on behalf of a U.S. government agency, a Western European government and some private clients, adding it wasn’t allowed to be more specific under the terms of its client agreements. “We need to get the message back to Ukraine that we’re good guys, not bad guys,” Premise CEO Maury Blackman said.

Bogdan Kulynych, a Ukrainian Ph.D. candidate who works on privacy and security issues, drew attention to the app’s work in his country in a series of viral tweets, calling Premise’s activities in a war zone “a very bad idea.”

“Ukrainian society is rightfully on the edge,” he wrote on Twitter. “I think that paying locals literally pennies to engage in suspicious activities that could get them detained, or worse, is harmful.”

A Premise spokesman said the company had been the target of a disinformation campaign and had expressed its concerns to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Google halted Android users’ ability to download the app in Ukraine for several days before reversing itself this week. Google and the FBI didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Premise and apps like it are windows into the global geopolitical competition for user data playing out on personal computers and smart devices. The U.S. Defense Department is investing heavily in open-source intelligence—including the kind of unclassified data that Premise collects. A top defense-intelligence official said at a conference in December that 80% of what is in intelligence reports now comes from unclassified sources.

The clients for Premise’s data include an array of military commands—often entities responsible for intelligence gathering or operations planning. Premise has provided data to U.S. Army Intelligence in Europe, according to contracting documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Numerous units of the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, have also been Premise customers, documents show. Premise also received funding to work with a technology incubator affiliated with SOCOM. The work entailed assessing how Premise’s data could be useful in planning tactical raids against high-value targets, documents show. SOCOM didn’t respond to requests for comment. U.S. Army intelligence said it used Premise in 2020 and 2021 but determined it didn’t fit the unit’s needs.

Premise told the Journal last year that about half of its customers were private corporations. However, people familiar with the company say the overwhelming majority of the company’s revenue has come in recent years from defense and intelligence work from U.S. and allied governments. At times, company leaders emphasized that the commercial work served as an important cover for the company’s government data collection, some of those people said—an accusation the company denies.

Mr. Blackman said revenue from commercial clients is growing and the company was pursuing them “as our primary market.” Premise declined to share the company’s revenues or financial projections with the Journal.

“Our contributors gather only publicly accessible data through photos of public places, as any tourist can do. The tasks that our contributors choose from are all publicly available and accessible from the Premise application, which is available for free to all to view on the app stores. Further, we disclose to our contributors in our terms of service that the data they collect can be sold to our customers. We provide data so that our customers, including private companies, nonprofits, and government departments, can better understand the world,” Mr. Blackman said.

To build its public-sector business, Premise launched a network in Russia that can be tasked to do data collection or observation, according to people familiar with the matter who say it was set up primarily to solicit gig workers in Russian cities and enable U.S. and allied governments to collect data from afar. Premise said it has contributors in Russia but denied they were primarily for government customers.

Premise also explored whether to enter the Chinese and Iranian markets but decided against it, according to the company. “Our goal is to learn as much as we can about the world, and the world does not just include democratic, Western developed nations,” a spokesman for the company said.

Premise said it works only with publicly accessible data, but many of its contracts viewed by the Journal show that some personnel are required to obtain top-secret security clearance and that its data is being used in classified programs. The company said some of its employees “are required to have security clearances to work in that customer’s facilities and interact with that customer’s employees. This does not contradict the irrefutable fact that 100% of the data our contributors collect is publicly available data.”

One product Premise advertises to public-sector customers is the ability to do covert signal monitoring using the sensors on a user’s smartphone to understand nearby cellular towers and wireless networks, the people said. That kind of data turns a phone into a remote sensor that can be used to do basic digital reconnaissance in advance of a more sophisticated intrusion such as a hack or to figure out how to jam communications in advance of a raid.

Premise experienced a significant exodus of employees as defense work grew to be a larger share of its portfolio around 2018, people familiar with the matter said. Some employees expressed concern to management that the app was asking contributors to take on potentially dangerous situations including photographing flooding in Vietnam, gang activity in Central America or ports in Asia, the people said. The company, which has said some of its former employees were disgruntled, has brought lawsuits against some of them for disparaging the company. Some of those suits have been dismissed and others are ongoing.

The company said it was aware of the arrest of about two dozen Premise users while performing tasks, out of what it said was a total user base of 3.5 million over the last three years. They include a Malawian arrested on suspicion of black magic in rural Africa and a Palestinian who said he was arrested for taking photographs, according to people familiar with the matter. Most of those Premise users arrested or detained drew the attention of security guards or police when conspicuously taking smartphone photographs, the people said, adding that some users also faced occasional threats of violence while photographing sites such as markets, banks, mosques, police stations and gas stations.

The company said one contributor in Rwanda was detained for two weeks. It said it couldn’t confirm some of the arrests the Journal has identified and wasn’t aware of any contributors being convicted of a crime.

The company built safety systems into its app, including screens that tell users to leave the area if requested. It experimented with giving contributors credentials or letters to try to explain Premise’s work and prepared a response plan in case a contributor was killed, the people said. No Premise contributor has ever been injured on the job, the company said. Certain proposed projects involving photographing ports or sites suspected of being affiliated with terrorist groups have been turned down over safety concerns, the people said.

Premise said the number of contributors arrested represents just 0.0007% of its total contributor base. The company also said in November it had engaged former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his company, The Chertoff Group, to study how to improve contributor safety.