The European Centre for Digital Rights, known as Noyb, announced on Tuesday 27 October that it is filing five legal complaints across Europe against San Francisco-based startup Scale AI. The complaints target the company's training platform, Outlier, specifically concerning how it tracks its workforce and the protections afforded by its freelance contract model. Noyb stated that the platform utilizes over 900,000 freelancers to evaluate and correct responses for artificial intelligence systems, with clients including Meta, OpenAI, Google, and the U.S. government.
The organization alleged that Outlier "collects huge amounts of personal data and forces workers to go through an invasive biometric verification to earn money." Noyb further contended that while workers are on the Outlier platform, trackers from companies such as TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook are placed on their devices, granting access to personal data including IP addresses and contact details, which the group noted can be used for targeted advertising and profiling. Lisa Steinfeld Leiser, a Data Protection Lawyer at Noyb, questioned the necessity of such monitoring, stating, "Why should LinkedIn or Facebook know which tasks you're working on?"
The complaints are filed in Austria, France, the Netherlands, and Italy, alleging that the far-reaching workplace surveillance "clearly violates the workers’ fundamental right to data protection." Additionally, Noyb alleged that Scale AI mandates workers to repeatedly undergo a biometric verification process conducted by a company named Persona, which requires video recordings of the worker's face and the uploading of identification.
