Meta's 49% stake in Scale AI just picked up a European legal problem
Privacy group noyb filed five complaints under the GDPR, Europe's privacy law, against Scale AI's Outlier platform on October 27, alleging illegal surveillance of the 900,000 freelancers who train frontier models. Meta owns 49% of Scale and is a named customer, so the exposure lands on a listed company.
Richard Tang · 3 min read
noyb, the Austrian privacy group, filed five complaints under the GDPR, Europe's privacy law, against Scale AI$29B — Scale AI, private, latest valuation $29B today in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria 1. The target is Outlier, the platform where more than 900,000 freelancers write prompts and rank answers for customers including Meta−0.85% — Meta, down 0.85 percent today, OpenAI$500B — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $500B, Google and the US government 1. Meta owns 49% of Scale AI 2.
The complaints allege constant tracking and ignored data requests
Up to 19 trackers followed workers while they worked, recording keystrokes and mouse movements every few seconds, according to the complaints seen by Reuters 2. DiPLab, the Paris research collective behind a two-year study, found the resulting files could be rebuilt into a video replaying a work session from start to finish 2.
Workers must also submit ID documents and face video to Persona, an identity-verification firm; noyb says about 70,000 photos of government IDs stored with Persona were exposed by hackers in October 2025 21. Four workers who asked Outlier for copies of their data between December 2025 and May 2026 received no answer, which noyb says violates their right of access under the GDPR 21.
The work runs on the platform's schedule
Outlier's recruitment page tells experts to "work from wherever and whenever," with "complete control over your schedule" 3. Thomas Le Bonniec, who spent two years studying the platform for DiPLab, found the opposite: "You work when the platform wants you to and there are tasks available" 2. Bonuses of $100 to $200 for completing 200 tasks in 24 hours set the pace 2. On this evidence, the tracking functions as the platform's quality control at this scale and price, so an order against it would change how Outlier is built.
Meta is both owner and customer
Meta, the only listed company in this chain, paid about $14.3 billion for its 49% stake in June 2025 and is also a named Outlier customer 42. noyb is asking regulators not only to fine Scale but to examine how the platform assigns tasks 2. If assignment rules change, the cost of the human feedback data moves for every frontier lab buying it. Scale did not respond to a request for comment 2.
One day after a governance launch in Dubai
Yesterday, October 26, Scale formally launched its UAE entity at the Dubai AI Festival, describing governance as "building oversight into a system from the start" 5. Today its labor platform stands accused of surveillance that Le Bonniec says "would be seen as unacceptable in any other form of employment in the European Union" 1.
Four regulators now hold the complaints
The complaints sit with the data protection authorities of France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria, two of the five filed in Austria 16. noyb has asked each for a full investigation and an administrative fine 1, and also wants regulators to examine how tasks are assigned 2. There is precedent: Italy's authority fined the delivery platform Glovo in 2021 over similar gamification 2.
These are allegations, and no regulator has ruled. But if one of the four orders the tracking stopped or the task rules rewritten, the price of the human data behind frontier models changes, and Meta holds 49% of the company that supplies it.
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