Today, noyb (in collaboration with Intérêt à Agir, DIPLab and Reversing.Works) has filed 5 complaints against Scale AI in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The US-based company operates an AI training platform named Outlier, which employs more than 900,000 “freelance” workers. Among its customers: Meta, OpenAI, Google – and the US government. However, it's not just the workers' extensive knowledge and experience that Scale AI is farming: The company collects huge amounts of personal data and forces workers to go through an invasive biometric verification to earn money. In Europe, this far-reaching workplace surveillance clearly violates the workers’ fundamental right to data protection.
- Complaint in France
- Complaint in Italy
- Complaint in the Netherlands
- Complaint in Austria #1; Complaint in Austria #2
- Report by DiPLab on workplace surveillance by AI training platforms
What is platform work – and what does it have to do with AI? From courier services like Uber and food delivery services, all the way to data annotation: more than 40 million people already have their work organised by platforms. This puts people in a vulnerable position: Among other things, companies try to circumvent labour laws by (wrongly) claiming that their workers are self-employed. This often excludes them from social benefits and affects their wages. Unsurprisingly, the AI industry heavily relies on this new type of work. Popular AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok are also trained by actual people who manually review or annotate their output.
Scale AI – almost 1 million workers. One of the biggest players in this field is the US company Scale AI, which operates the data annotation platform Outlier AI. Outlier employs more than 900,000 “freelance” platform workers who train AI systems by solving tasks (e.g. writing prompts, ranking answers, etc.), effectively giving their expert knowledge to US Big Tech companies. Its best-known customers are corporations such as Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Google, Anthropic, and the US government.
Thomas Le Bonniec, sociology researcher at DIPLab: “Platform work seems to be fertile ground for a whole new type of workplace surveillance. This would be seen as unacceptable in any other form of employment in the European Union. This system only thrives because of its deliberate lack of transparency.”
Invasive tracking. However, questionable employment practices are not the only issue: Outlier is subjecting its workers to invasive tracking. Our technical analysis showed that while workers are on the Outlier platform, trackers from companies such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, the survey platform Sprig and the data analysis company Datadog are placed on their devices. Every few seconds, these trackers send the workers’ personal data to third parties. This includes IP addresses, contact details, unique identifiers and information about the visited page. Among other things, this data can then be used for targeted advertising and profiling.
Lisa Steinfeld Leiser, Data Protection Lawyer at noyb: “Such constant and extensive trackingwhile working really goes against all reasonable expectations. Why should LinkedIn or Facebook know which tasks you're working on?”
Forced biometric identification. As if that weren’t enough, Scale AI also forces workers to repeatedly go through a biometric verification process carried out by a company called Persona. This includes video recordings of their face and uploading their ID. Scale AI claims that this is done to prevent identity fraud and to “verify the workers’ skills”. In reality, this not only goes far beyond what would be necessary, but Persona also has a questionable history when it comes to data security. In October 2025, approximately 70,000 photos of government issued IDs stored with Persona were exposed by hackers. On top of that, Persona grants itself the right to collect heaps of personal data, including IP addresses, device information, geolocation data, addresses, and consumer credit data of users.
Baptiste Delmas, project coordinator at Intérêt à Agir: “The violations highlighted in the complaints against Scale AI clearly show that the AI boom relies on a vast workforce whose privacy is at stake. Data protection authorities must now take these issues seriously and impose strict enforcement measures.“
Complaints filed in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. noyb has now filed a total of 5 GDPR complaints against Scale AI. Not only does the company lack a valid legal basis to place trackers on the complainants’ devices without consent, it also violates the GDPR’s principle of data minimisation. The same goes fo the processing of biometric data. Last but not least, Scale AI didn’t even bother to respond to the complainant’s access requests, thereby violating their right of access under the GDPR. noyb requests a full investigation of the violations and suggests that the competent authorities impose an administrative fine to prevent similar violations in the future.
- These 5 noyb complaints are part of an interdisciplinary initiative on working conditions across AI value chains (AI-WORLD), led by Intérêt à Agir in partnership with DipLab and supported by the European AI & Society Fund and the Digital Freedom Fund
- To find out more about the working conditions of platform workers, please take a look at this report by DiPLab.
