Data privacy and digital work platforms in global perspective

Abstract

The article focuses on privacy risks in the global platform labour market. As an empirical analysis of privacy statements shows, German, Chinese and U.S. crowdsourcing platforms collect large amounts of personal data from workers and other users. Some platforms use detailed monitoring measures of work processes that are questionable from a data protection point of view. German platforms are relatively transparent in their data handling compared to non-European portals. They also stand out positively in terms of self- initiative precautions such as anonymisation and pseudonymisation of personal data. Nevertheless, there are also data protection gaps here. There is thus a need for further legal policy action to improve privacy rights for platform workers in the future.