EU privacy advocates accuse US data annotation firm of snooping on contractors

US data annotation operation Scale AI faces five GDPR complaints in four EU countries over allegations that it unlawfully monitors European contractors.

Privacy campaigner noyb alleges that Scale tracks contractors who perform data annotation work on its Outlier AI platform. Like workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform of yore, Outlier contractors label data, evaluate AI-generated responses, and perform other tasks to improve AI models. Scale counts companies including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google, as well as the US government, among its customers.

Scale AI faces allegations similar to those noyb has made against other US tech firms since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in 2018, namely violations of said regulation.

With all that work being done digitally and remotely, Scale has extensive data collection practices to not only verify the identity of Outlier workers, but also to extensively track their activity.

“Platform work seems to be fertile ground for a whole new type of workplace …