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 surveillance,” said Thomas Le Bonniec, sociology researcher at French privacy research group DIPLab, who co-authored a report earlier this month examining Outlier’s data collection practices. “This would be seen as unacceptable in any other form of employment in the European Union.” Among the issues that raised the hackles of noyb’s lawyers was identity verification conducted by Persona, a company that has faced scrutiny over an exposed test environment associated with its efforts to secure US government business. Researchers speculated that the system could be used to build a people tracker, but Persona rejected that interpretation and denied having active US government contracts. Separately, Persona’s relationship with chat app Discord soured ahead of the platform’s broader age verification rollout, with Discord saying the provider failed to meet its requirements for on-device facial age estimation…