THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • noyb filed five complaints on 27 October 2026 with regulators in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria, two of them in Austria.
  • The complaints allege up to 19 third-party trackers, repeated biometric identity checks and unanswered GDPR access requests on Outlier.
  • Scale AI called the claims unfounded and inaccurate, saying its tools serve identity checks, fraud prevention and accurate payments.

The privacy group noyb has filed five complaints under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) against Scale AI, the data-labelling company, over the way its Outlier platform monitors the freelancers who produce AI training data. The complaints, filed on 27 October 2026, went to data protection authorities in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria, with Austria receiving two. noyb coordinated the filings with the French association Intérêt à Agir, the research group DIPLab and Reversing.Works.

What the complaints allege

According to reports by Reuters and Tech Times, noyb says the monitoring concerns more than 900,000 freelancers on Outlier. The group alleges that up to 19 third-party trackers, including tools from TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Sprig and Datadog, run while workers are on the platform and send information such as IP addresses, device identifiers and the task being worked on, in some cases every few seconds. A noyb lawyer asked why LinkedIn or Facebook should know which tasks a worker is doing.

The complaints also target repeated identity checks run through the vendor Persona, which involve face video and ID uploads. noyb argues these involve biometric data, a special category under Article 9 of the GDPR. Other provisions cited include Article 5 on data minimisation and Article 6(1)(f) on legitimate interests, the legal basis Outlier relies on for screen monitoring. Four workers reportedly filed access requests under Article 15 between December 2025 and May 2026 without receiving the data.

noyb asks each authority to investigate and to impose fines where violations are confirmed. Under the GDPR, fines can reach €20 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.

Scale AI's response

In an emailed statement reported by Reuters, Scale AI described the claims as "unfounded and inaccurate". The company says it uses standard tools to verify identities, prevent fraud, protect confidential project information and ensure accurate pay. It says a separate time-tracking and screen-activity tool is used only on some projects, where contributors opt in and switch it on themselves, and that it does not sell workers' personal data or use it to train customers' models.

What happens next

No violation has been established. Each national regulator must decide whether and how to investigate, a process that can take months or years.