A prominent data protection group on Tuesday said it was filing five legal complaints in Europe against San Francisco-based startup Scale AI over the way its training platform Outlier handles data.
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.
Outlier recruits freelancers and subject-matter experts to help train, evaluate and improve artificial intelligence models.
According to Noyb, it 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.
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.
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.
According to Noyb, the case highlights the vulnerability of so-called platform workers, also used by courier services like Uber and food delivery services.
AFP
