the people who train ai say the training app is watching them

outlier is where a lot of ai gets its homework marked. scale ai runs the platform, and more than 900,000 freelancers use it to label data and grade chatbot answers for customers that, according to noyb, include openai, google, meta and anthropic. on tuesday noyb filed five gdpr complaints against scale, in austria, france, italy and the netherlands.

the claim is about what runs while people work. noyb says outlier places trackers from tiktok, linkedin, facebook and analytics firms on workers’ devices, and that they report back every few seconds with ip addresses, identifiers and the pages a worker visits. workers also have to verify themselves again and again through persona, with a face video and an id upload. noyb argues there is no legal basis for the trackers, that the biometric checks go beyond what is needed, and that scale ignored workers’ requests to see their own data.

scale told the register the claims are unfounded and inaccurate, and that its practices are disclosed to contributors, need their consent, and exist to stop fraud, protect clients’ projects and pay people correctly. consent is likely to be the crux, because under the gdpr it only counts if it is freely given.

“why should linkedin or facebook know which tasks you’re working on?”