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A prominent European data protection group said it was filing five legal complaints in Europe against American startup Scale AI over the way its training platform Outlier tracks its workers, infringing on their rights.
It comes as AI companies face increasing scrutiny in Europe, with the EU’s AI Office opening investigations into OpenAI and Anthropic this month. In the US, meanwhile, President Donald Trump signed an agreement with the six largest American AI firms allowing them to regulate themselves, a sign of growing divisions over how to govern the technology globally.
There are also growing concerns worldwide that AI could take people’s jobs and be used for harmful purposes.
The European Centre for Digital Rights, known as Noyb, is filing two complaints in Austria, one in France, one in the Netherlands and another in Italy, it said in a statement published on Tuesday 27 October, relating to the way workers are trackers and the lack of protections granted by its freelance contract model to recruit staff.
Scale AI’s Outlier AI platform recruits freelancers and subject-matter experts to help train, evaluate and improve artificial intelligence models, using a platform worker model like those used by Uber and food delivery services.
According to Noyb, the platform uses more than 900,000 freelancers to evaluate and correct the responses of AI systems, with customers including Meta, OpenAI, Google and the US government, which the organisation describes as a process in which workers are “effectively giving their expertise to US Big Tech companies”.
Outlier "collects huge amounts of personal data and forces workers to go through an invasive biometric verification to earn money", the NGO said.
"In Europe, this far-reaching workplace surveillance clearly violates the workers’ fundamental right to data protection," it said.
Noyb alleges that while workers are on the Outlier platform, trackers from companies such as TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook are placed on their devices and given access to their personal data.
This includes IP addresses, contact details and data that can be used for targeted advertising and profiling, the group said.
“Such constant and extensive tracking while working really goes against all reasonable expectations. Why should LinkedIn or Facebook know which tasks you're working on?” said Lisa Steinfeld Leiser, Data Protection Lawyer at Noyb.
It also alleges that Scale AI forces workers to repeatedly go through a biometric verification process carried out by a company called Persona, which includes making video recordings of their face and uploading their ID.