Complaints filed against Scale AI over alleged illegal worker surveillance

European digital privacy advocacy group noyb has filed five complaints against Scale AI in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Austria, alleging the illegal surveillance of freelancers who produce training data for artificial intelligence models.

The complaints target the Outlier platform, which hosts more than 900,000 freelancers who perform tasks recorded to create AI training data for clients such as Meta, OpenAI, and Google. Meta holds a 49% stake in Scale AI.

Noyb is requesting that regulators impose fines on Scale AI and investigate how the platform assigns tasks. The complaints indicate that there are as many as 19 trackers monitoring employees while they work, including the recording of keystrokes and mouse movements every few seconds. An analysis by the Paris-based research collective DiPLab revealed that the resulting file could be turned into a video that replays a work session from start to finish.

Workers are also required to submit identity documents and a video of their face to the identity verification firm Persona; the complaints state that this violates EU rules regarding biometric data. Additionally, four workers requested copies of their data from Outlier between December 2025 and May 2026, but none received a response. Scale AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.