European digital rights nonprofit noyb sues Scale AI for ‘invasive’ worker surveillance

The Austria-based digital privacy advocacy group noyb on Tuesday filed five complaints against a major artificial intelligence company alleging that its practices violate European law by tracking freelance workers’ web activity as they generate AI model training data.

The complaints — filed in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria against Scale AI – also allege the firm illegally requires workers’ to submit biometric data.

Noyb’s complaints focused on Scale’s Outlier platform, which is used by tech giants such as Google, Meta and OpenAI. Meta owns nearly half of Scale.

Scale has worked with more than 900,00 people to create the training data. Noyb alleges the platform in some cases records freelancers’ mouse clicks and keystrokes every few seconds and claims the collected information can be used to generate video documenting freelancers’ entire workday.

The data collected by the trackers includes IP addresses, contact details, unique identifiers and “information about the visited page,” noyb said in a press release, and can be used for targeted advertising.

Noyb spokesperson Mickey Manakas said an analysis identified 18 third-party trackers used by Scale to track French freelancers’ data. 

“There are definitely more,” Manakas said via email, adding that the number of trackers identified varies by country and is not comprehensive since noyb focused primarily on social media trackers and analytics.

Noyb is asking courts in the four countries to issue fines and wants governments to launch investigations and study the way tasks are allocated by Scale.

The nonprofit has a long history of waging and winning data privacy suits against tech giants.

It won a case against TikTok in May 2025 that resulted in the social media behemoth paying a €530 million ($590 million) fine for transferring European customers’ data to China. 

In late 2023, Meta was fined €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) and ordered to stop transferring European users’ data to the U.S. following a noyb complaint.

Tracking and biometrics

The biometric data collection component of the complaints center on the fact that Scale allegedly requires workers to submit such data as a condition for employment. They must give identity verifier Persona face video and identification documents, according to noyb. 

Four freelancers requested that Outlier turn over copies of all personal data collected from both the tracking system and biometric verification process between December 2025 and May 2026, but Scale never responded to them, noyb said.

The company allegedly forces workers to go through the “invasive” biometric verification to earn money, a noyb press release said. The far-reaching workplace surveillance violates the workers’ fundamental right to data protection, noyb maintains.

Noyb said trackers from TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, the survey platform Sprig and the data analysis company Datadog were also found to be embedded in worker devices.

“Such constant and extensive tracking while working really goes against all reasonable expectations,” Lisa Steinfeld Leiser, a data protection lawyer at noyb, said in the press release. “Why should LinkedIn or Facebook know which tasks you’re working on?”

Scale not only lacks a “valid legal basis” for deploying the trackers, but also violates Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation requirements regarding data minimization, the press release said.

A Scale spokesperson said in a statement that it disputes noyb’s allegations about how the third-party trackers allegedly surveil workers and asserts its biometric data practices are appropriate.

“The report’s claims are unfounded and inaccurate,” the spokesperson said.

In some cases, the spokesperson said, Scale records screen activity and task duration, but does not do so unless workers opt in.

The spokesperson said that while Outlier does sometimes verify workers’ identities, it does so to combat fraud and misuse, comply with European law and allows workers to request that their data be deleted at any time.

Scale also does not sell contributors’ personal data to third parties or use their personal information to train customer AI models, the spokesperson said.