# Training AI Pays. The Platform Records Your Keystrokes, Complaints Say.

*A European privacy group filed five complaints today against Scale AI's Outlier, where more than 900,000 freelancers help teach chatbots. A day earlier, Microsoft offered about 60,000 employees a way out. Both show who writes the rules for work in the AI boom.*

By Jay Cadmus | Published October 27, 2026
Canonical: https://theainextwave.com/editions/2026-10-27/

## The Short Version

Picture a freelancer in Paris or Vienna opening a laptop after dinner to grade chatbot answers for extra money. Between December and May, four people who do that work on a platform called Outlier each asked the same thing: send me a copy of the data you keep on me. According to complaints filed today, none of them got a reply.

The complaints, filed by the Vienna privacy group noyb in Austria, France, Italy and the Netherlands, describe what happens during a shift. Up to 19 trackers follow workers while they work, recording keystrokes and mouse movements every few seconds. Workers also have to send a face video and an ID, again and again, to an identity-check company. Scale AI, which runs Outlier and is 49 percent owned by Meta, didn't immediately respond to Reuters.

These are allegations, and regulators will decide whether they break European law. What they show is how little the people teaching AI get to see about their own work. On Monday, Microsoft showed a different version of the same imbalance.

## What the complaints say happens during a shift

Outlier hires freelancers and subject experts to write prompts, rate chatbot answers and fix the mistakes. Its customers include Meta, OpenAI, Google and the US government, according to noyb. The group says more than 900,000 people do this work.

The complaints, as Reuters described them, say the trackers capture keystrokes and mouse movement every few seconds. A Paris research group called DiPLab found the recorded file could be rebuilt into a video that replays a worker's whole session. AFP reported that noyb also says trackers from TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook run on workers' devices while they use the platform, which can pass along IP addresses, contact details and data usable for ad targeting. "Why should LinkedIn or Facebook know which tasks you're working on?" noyb lawyer Lisa Steinfeld Leiser asked, according to Euronews.

The pay side runs on bonuses. Thomas Le Bonniec, who studied the platform for two years for DiPLab, told Reuters that workers reported bonuses of $100 to $200 for finishing 200 tasks in 24 hours. That's a lot of tasks in one day, and the money arrives only if you hit the target. "You work when the platform wants you to and there are tasks available," he said.

Then there's the identity check. Workers send ID documents and a face video to a verification company called Persona, and the complaints say those checks repeat without explanation. noyb argues that breaks Europe's rules on biometric data. It wants regulators to fine Scale and to look at how the platform hands out tasks. Italy's privacy regulator fined the delivery app Glovo in 2021 over a similar bonus-driven system, which gives the group a precedent to point to.

## Why a record of your typing is worth keeping

Nothing in today's reporting says Outlier uses its tracking data to train AI. The complaints are about privacy and consent. But the same kind of record has become valuable on its own, and Meta, which owns 49 percent of Scale, showed why earlier this year.

Meta launched an internal program to capture its own employees' mouse movements and keystrokes so it could train AI agents to do office work, Quartz reported. Mark Zuckerberg described the goal as "watching really smart people do things." After staff complained about privacy, battery drain and slow laptops, Meta let employees pause collection for 30 minutes at a time and let a narrower group opt out entirely.

My read is that this is where the friction will keep showing up. AI companies need examples of skilled people working, and the cheapest way to get them is to record people while they work. The person being recorded often learns the details only when a researcher, a leaked memo or a complaint spells them out.

## Where American workers stand

The European complaints rest on a law most US gig workers don't have. Still, a few protections exist, and one of them fits the situation of those four workers.

California's privacy law gives residents the right to ask a covered business what personal information it has collected about them and how it's used, up to twice a year for free. The state's privacy agency says the business has 10 business days to confirm it got your request and 45 calendar days to give a real answer. It can stretch that by another 45 days if it tells you. If it ignores you, you can file a complaint with the agency online, and you can do it anonymously.

California also signed three workplace AI bills on Sept. 30. One bans employers from using AI surveillance tools that guess at a worker's emotions or collect brain data. Another, starting July 1, 2027, stops employers from firing or disciplining someone based only on an automated system's output; a person has to check it first. Those laws are written around employers and employees, and Outlier calls the people on its platform freelancers. Whether they reach a platform like this one is a question for lawyers and regulators.

## Microsoft's offer, and the email 60,000 people opened Monday

On Monday, Microsoft's chief people officer, Amy Coleman, told employees that a "time-limited" voluntary exit offer was coming to eligible staff in the US, Canada, the UK and India. About 60,000 people qualify, roughly a quarter of a company of 223,000, according to GeekWire. There's no age or tenure test, and performance isn't a factor. Business leaders decide whether their teams take part. Sales, some engineering groups and some corporate teams are out, and Bloomberg reported that data center staff are excluded too.

Coleman's memo never mentions AI, while CBS News and Fortune both tie the offer to Microsoft's heavy spending on it. Fortune notes the company spent $41 billion on capital projects in the quarter that ended in June. Microsoft says the offer doesn't mean it needs fewer people and isn't a replacement for layoffs, which it says remain possible depending on business conditions.

The package matches Microsoft's standard severance. In the US that means at least eight weeks of pay, according to a spokesperson quoted by Fortune, plus continued stock vesting, health coverage for a set period and career help. Reports differ on the deadline. GeekWire says employees have until the first week of December to decide, and Fortune describes an acceptance window from early December to Dec. 31. Anyone weighing this should go by the date in their own offer email, since that's the one that binds them.

How many will take it is unknown. A spokesperson pointed Fortune to similar programs at other big tech companies where 3 to 5 percent accepted. Applied to 60,000 people, that would be roughly 1,800 to 3,000 departures, which is my arithmetic and not a company forecast. A spring retirement offer at Microsoft drew about 30 percent of roughly 8,750 eligible US employees, and the company expects far fewer this time.

At one kitchen table, it might look like this. Picture a program manager in Redmond, a made-up example, with two kids and a mortgage, who opens the email Monday night. Before deciding anything, she needs the numbers in the offer itself: weeks of pay at her level and tenure, which stock grants keep vesting and until when, and the exact day health coverage ends. Her baseline is what staying is worth, salary plus the grants she'd collect over the next year, weighed against the chance she's laid off anyway. Microsoft has said layoffs stay on the table, and it cut about 4,800 jobs in July. A small, bounded test is to build a household budget for six months with no paycheck and see whether the severance and savings cover it. Where it can go wrong: she leaves, the job search takes longer than the money lasts, and the health coverage runs out first. She holds the final say on accepting, but her business leader decided whether she got the offer at all.

## What You Can Do With This

### If you do AI training gigs on the side

Keep your own record of what you submit and what you're paid, with dates, because the platform's own record is hard to get. If you live in California and the company is covered by the state's privacy law, you can ask for the data it holds on you; it has 45 days to answer, and you can complain to the state privacy agency if it doesn't. Read the identity-check and tracking sections of the terms before your next shift, and decide whether the pay is worth it.

### If you or someone at your table got the Microsoft email

Pull the numbers from the offer first, then talk about it. Write down the deadline in your email, the last day of health coverage and the next stock vesting date, since those three dates decide most of the math. If six months without a paycheck would hurt, that's a good reason to slow down before saying yes.

### If you manage people and are shopping for productivity software

Ask the vendor whether the tool records keystrokes or screen activity, who else receives that data, and how a worker can see their own file. If you have staff in California, check the new rules on AI tools that read emotions before you buy anything that claims to measure engagement or mood.

## The Bigger Picture

AI is built from people's work, and more of that work is being recorded as it happens. The people training the systems, from freelancers in Europe to staff at Meta, are learning what's captured after the fact, through complaints, leaks or internal pushback. At Microsoft, people are making a big money decision with a deadline that even the news reports don't agree on.

I think the next fight over AI and jobs will be about visibility as much as pay: who gets to see the record of your work, and who decides what it's used for. The four Outlier workers asked a simple question and, by their account, got silence. Watch whether European regulators make Scale answer them, because that answer will show how much say the people training AI have over their own records.

## References

[Reuters via Business Day: Privacy group accuses Scale AI of illegal worker surveillance (Oct. 27, 2026)](https://www.businessday.co.za/world/2026-10-27-privacy-group-accuses-scale-ai-of-illegal-worker-surveillance/)
[Reuters via 93.3 The Drive: Privacy group files complaints against Scale AI over alleged worker surveillance (Oct. 27, 2026)](https://www.933thedrive.com/2026/10/27/privacy-group-files-complaints-against-scale-ai-over-alleged-worker-surveillance/)
[AFP via The Star: Data rights group takes aim at AI platform Scale (Oct. 27, 2026)](https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/10/27/data-rights-group-takes-aim-at-ai-platform-scale)
[Euronews: Why should Big Tech know what you're working on? Scale AI accused of spying on AI trainers (Oct. 27, 2026)](https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/27/why-should-big-tech-know-what-youre-working-on-scale-ai-accused-of-spying-on-ai-trainers)
[Quartz: Meta employee tracking program backlash (updated July 3, 2026)](https://qz.com/meta-employee-tracking-program-backlash-060326)
[California Privacy Protection Agency: Frequently Asked Questions on consumer rights](https://cppa.ca.gov/faq.html)
[Ogletree: California Governor Signs 3 Bills Targeting AI and Workplace Surveillance (Oct. 1, 2026)](https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/california-governor-signs-3-bills-targeting-ai-and-workplace-surveillance/)
[Microsoft Official Blog: Amy Coleman memo introducing a voluntary exit offer (Oct. 26, 2026)](https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-voluntary-exit-offer/)
[GeekWire: Microsoft makes new 'voluntary exit' offer to about a quarter of its workforce (Oct. 26, 2026)](https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-exit-offer-to-more-than-a-quarter-of-its-workforce-including-some-execs/)
[Fortune: Microsoft offers buyouts to nearly 30% of workforce in ongoing AI shift (Oct. 26, 2026)](https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-offers-buyouts-to-nearly-30-of-workforce-in-ongoing-ai-shift)
[CBS News: Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 workers as it pours money into AI (Oct. 26, 2026)](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-buyouts-60000-workers-artificial-intelligence-layoffs/)