[Report] New DiPLab Report: Surveillance at Scale

DiPLab is releasing a report on the surveillance of data workers today. Entitled “Surveillance at Scale : How AI training platforms gather personal data from European workers” this report is a research project in collaboration with Reversing.works and Intérêt à Agir, funded by the Digital Freedom Fund and the European Artificial Intelligence & Society Fund.

International technology companies collect vast amounts of personal data from European citizens. Public debate and policymaking often focus on data taken from consumers through e-commerce, social media, or streaming platforms. Yet many Europeans also use digital platforms to work and train AI systems.

Online freelance platforms are usually discussed in terms of low pay and insecure “gigs”. Much less attention is given to another resource these platforms extract from workers: their personal data. This report examines the case of Outlier, a key data work platform for artificial intelligence.

Outlier is operated by Scale AI, a company that recruits workers to perform tasks such as evaluating AI-generated responses, creating training data, and improving AI models. This report shows how digital platforms rely on data workers worldwide, including in the EU, to label, check, and organize training data.

These data are harvested online. But Outlier also collects workers’ personal data, financial records, biometric information, and even facial recognition scans. This data is used for surveillance purposes, and probably for further AI training purposes. Our interdisciplinary team analyzes the evidence collected from qualitative interviews, network logs, and guidelines, to provide evidence of a large-scale data collection process, through hidden trackers.

We also provide a legal analysis in terms of likely European law (GDPR) data protection violations : the AI WORLd project reveals how the EU has become a periphery for data extractivism in the production process of AI models. Ethical AI requires the ethical treatment of the modern-day factory workers whose work makes it possible. Beyond the economic exploitation data workers through inadequate compensation, this report reveals the extraction of personal data for purposes ranging from covert AI training to potential military applications. These practices raise serious concerns about social justice, labor law, and European data security.

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To site this report :

Thomas Le Bonniec , Antonio A. Casilli, Mathilde Abel, Simone Robutti, Gaetano Priori, Donatella D., Paul S.

Surveillance at Scale : How AI Training Platforms Gather Personal Data from European Workers

DiPLab / Reversing.Works report, 2026.